Students’ Process and Strategies as They Program for Mathematical Investigations and Applications

This paper focuses on the process of university mathematics students engaging in a sequence of programming-based mathematical project tasks as part of a course. Data of this naturalistic research was collected mainly through four student projects and semi-structured individual interviews. The analysis led to narratives of students’ development process (instrumental genesis) in which enacted strategies (instrumented actions) are highlighted. In this paper we discuss a participant’s development process. Results suggest that the student, after 1 course, has appropriated programming as instrument for creating a tool for pragmatic purposes; however, not yet as instrument for mathematics investigations and applications, i.e., as an object-to-think-with (Papert, 1980).