Analyzing Students’ Computational Thinking and Programming Skills for Mathematical Problem Solving

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze students’ computational thinking and programming skills for mathematical problem-solving in a programming course at the undergraduate level. The chapter critically reviews the research literature in the field and proposes a model that connects mathematical thinking to computational thinking and programming. The model is then used as a theoretical basis to collect and analyze data from three groups of three students solving a mathematical task. The results reveal that the participating students faced several challenges: The lack of mathematical thinking, insufficient experience with computational thinking, and, more importantly, lack of deeper connection between computational and mathematical thinking, severely impeded their work. Conclusions, limitations, practical implications, and future research work are drawn from the results to explore mathematical problem solving through computational thinking and programming in a larger group of students. Studies involving a larger number of participants would be relevant to compare with findings of the present study to achieve more reliability and validity.