PROCEEDINGS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2019
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Using a computational context to investigate student reasoning bout whether “order matters” in counting problems
Page: 385
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.