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Title: Using a computational context to investigate student reasoning about whether “order matters” in counting problems
Students often struggle with issues of order – that is, with distinguishing between permutations and combinations – when solving counting problems. There is a need to explore potential interventions to help students conceptually understand whether “order matters” and to differentiate meaningfully between these operations. In this paper, I investigate students’ understanding of the issue of order in the context of Python computer programming. I show that some of the program commands seemed to reinforce important conceptual understandings of permutations and combinations and issues of order. I suggest that this is one example of a way in which a computational setting may facilitate mathematical learning.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1650943
PAR ID:
10099133
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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