CCSE seminar series: Addy De Chenne: Student Verification Practices for Combinatorics Problems in a Computational Environment

Counting problems have been shown to be challenging for students to solve correctly, and one reason is that they can be difficult to verify (e.g., Eizenberg & Zaslavsky, 2004).

One possible avenue for verification is to have students engage with computational tools and environments. In this talk, I investigate how undergraduate students verified solutions to combinatorial problems in the context of using Python computer programming.

I show that students did not simply use a computed numerical answer when verifying, but they demonstrated a rich understanding between a computer program and a counting process. Further, I exhibit some affordances that using Python to verify solutions provided to the students.

Published Sep. 17, 2019 12:05 PM - Last modified Mar. 4, 2020 5:46 PM