Programming as a Tool for Helping Students Understand and Solve Quadratic Equations
Taub, David · 2024
This study explored the idea that working on programming tasks may help students learn mathematics. The aim of the study was to determine if the act of programming itself could help students construct new mathematical knowledge. This was motivated by the idea that in order to be able to write a program to deal with general solutions and methods, the students would need to reflect on their own knowledge and make their reasoning explicit and detailed. Three intervention cycles were conducted with different groups of Swedish secondary school students, the majority of which were novice programmers. The interventions themselves were modeled on task-based interviews though the overarching methodology and analysis was based on the Abstraction in Context theoretical framework. The findings indicate that although it seems possible for the act of programming itself to help students construct new mathematical concepts, it is unlikely to be an effective classroom strategy. The cognitive difficulties novice programmers encountered when writing programs became an obstacle to learning new mathematics as well as dramatically increasing the time needed to complete apparently simple tasks.