RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Using Mathematical Knowledge When Learning to Program: The Case of Jack
Page: 695
Students seeking careers in STEM will increasingly be required to develop proficiency with computational tools. As such, many students will be at least incentivized, if not required, to learn to program early on in their undergraduate careers. We hypothesize that, though many opportunities exist in which students can learn programming skills, providing undergraduate students with opportunities to program in the context of mathematics courses will be advantageous for students. We report on interviews conducted with students as they learned to program in the MATLAB language, undergraduate mathematics problems. We discuss how a student’s mathematical knowledge mediated his programming practices.