The movement towards a more experimental approach to problem solving in mathematics using coding

Abstract

Motivated by a problem proposed in a coding competition for secondary students, I will show on this paper how coding substantially changed the problem-solving process towards a more experimental approach.

Keywords:

• mathematics
• coding
• problem solving
• experimentation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ms Rita Santos Guimarães and Dr Colin Foster for their valuable contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://olimpiada.ic.unicamp.br

2. Note that I am numbering the first line of Pascal's triangle as 1, while it is common in other contexts to start with 0.

3. http://projecteuler.net

4. http://scratch.mit.edu