Using Computer Programming as an Effective Complement to Mathematics Education: Experimenting with the Standards for Mathematics Practice in a Multidisciplinary Environment for Teaching and Learning with Technology in the 21st Century
Pavel Šolı́n, Eugenio Roanes–Lozano · International Journal for Technology in Mathematics Education · 2020
Many mathematics educators are not aware of a strong connection that exists between the education of computer programming and mathematics. The reason may be that they have not been exposed to computer programming. This connection is worth exploring, given the current trends of automation and Industry 4.0. Therefore, in this paper we take a closer look at the Common Core's eight Mathematical Practice Standards. We show how each one of them can be reinforced through computer programming. The following discussion is virtually independent of the choice of a concrete programming language. Therefore, in the interest of simplicity, we will use a well-known educational programming language named Karel the Robot based on (Pattis, 1995) which is freely available online in NCLab (NCLab, 2019). The visual character of this language will allow us to provide more illustrative examples than would be possible with a standard programming language such as Java, C++ or Python.