Abstract:

Entering the post-digital era, we anticipate that the ideas of disruptive technologies will be left behind to embrace the materiality of artifacts—their affordances and limitations—regardless of their underlying construction. In this line of development, technology is embedded into education to reach learning goals beyond the technology itself. Curricula around the world are acknowledging this view to broaden pupils’ skills and subject understanding. In particular, learning mathematics is moving away from learning mechanical procedures toward visualizing functions, analyzing large sets of numerical data, devising algorithms to solve problems, and emulating stochastic scenarios. Computer programming serves as a means to achieve those goals and many mathematics teachers are now expected to include coding as yet another tool in their teaching arsenal.

The present paper reports the results of a teacher training intervention in which experienced mathematics teachers learned computer programming in order to teach mathematics with code. The participants were introduced to the programming language Python along with relevant examples connected to the Swedish mathematics curriculum. The results show that the teachers who were new to computer programming approached the task of producing a teaching activity that included coding with two different mindsets—Dual teaching and Interspersed programming. These two tactics had been previously observed in the classroom of mathematic teachers who were proficient in computer programming and refer to the bearing content of the learning activity. Dual teaching describes a tactical approach in which learning computer programming is seen as a separate skill and the mathematics involved are not the principal objective. Interspersed programming, on the other hand, captures the teaching activities that have a clear focus on a mathematical topic and resort to computer programming to advance students’ understanding in that unit. The choice of teaching mathematics with elements of programming rather than teaching programming with elements of mathematics, is therefore independent of the teacher’s proficiency in computer programming.

Keywords:

Programming, Coding, Computational thinking, Teacher training.