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The “Power of Computational Thinking in Mathematics and Data Science Education” working group held its inaugural meeting at PME-NA 45 in Reno, Nevada. The skills and practices of CT can empower teachers to emphasize abstraction, automation, modeling, and simulations as their students investigate relationships in mathematics and data science. The focus of the three sessions was to advance conversations about the integration of CT in mathematics and DS education with aims to launch new collaborations. Our overarching goal of providing more equitable access to authentic mathematical problem solving through guided the design and facilitation of the working group sessions. Participants experienced three CT-integrated data science tasks on Day 1, created working visuals of the synergies across the disciplines on Day 2, and proposed directions for future research on Day 3. 

Through our work to examine mathematical and computational learning in authentic and convivial contexts that requires creativity, imagination, reasoning, and discourse, we have theorized an experiential learning cycle that attends to the development of voice, agency, and identity needed in young people for an earned insurgency—the right to demand change. Our work underscores how the current situation that many students face in classrooms amounts to a type of cognitive segregation that denies these students access to authentic and empowering intellectual agency. By facilitating a process whereby students, using their own creative and imaginative means, intentionally develop a type of ownership over the exploration and application of the mathematical concepts they are being taught, we help students move from simple surface level, syntactic understandings, to deeper semantic learning that is more personally significant and meaningful.