Relations between mathematics and programming in school:

juxtaposing three different cases

Morten Misfeldt1, Uffe Thomas Jankvist2, Eirini Geraniou3 and Kajsa Bråting4
1
University of Copenhagen and OsloMet; [email protected], 2Aarhus University,
Danish School of Education, 3University College London, Institute of
Education,4Uppsala University, Department of Education
In this paper we juxtapose and give examples of mathematical aspects of how
programming is included in teaching in three different countries; Denmark, Sweden
and England. We look at cases of both curriculum standards and resources in order to
describe the nature of the relations between programming and mathematics. The
methodology consists of a case-based analysis, and can be seen as a first step in
developing an understanding of the nature of the relations between programming and
mathematics as it is enacted in different educational systems. We discriminate between
specific, explicit, implicit and weak relations and use these terms to describe the
differences between the cases.
Keywords: programming, computational thinking, mathematics education, digital
competencies.

INTRODUCTION
Many countries include programming as a part of the curriculum in compulsory
education. This is done in relation to different academic topics and to different degrees.
The aim of preparing students for the digital society is a general trend across many
educational systems (Bocconi et al., 2016). Mathematics has a special role in relation
to this ambition. Computer science shares many aspects of methods and objects with
mathematics and the preferred thinking styles and learning objectives to some extent
coincide (Misfeldt & Ejsing-Dunn 2015, Wing, 2006), which of course has to do with
the fact that computer science as a discipline originates from that of mathematics.
The widespread ambition of teaching programming in compulsory school has increased
significantly over the last years and different countries are adopting different routes.
Currently, relatively little work has been done in comparing these approaches (Bocconi
et al., 2016). In this paper, we make a first attempt at comparing the mathematical
aspects of how programming is adopted in compulsory school. We address this by
looking at cases of governmental curricular descriptions and teaching materials from
England, Sweden and Denmark in order to address the research question: Based on
three different case studies, what types of relations between mathematics and
programming in school exist?

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE AND METHODOLOGY

The ambition of using programming as a means to reform mathematics education has
been around for the last 40 years, and has led to educational innovations such as

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programming languages for kids and theoretical frameworks describing the learning of
mathematics with programming (Papert, 1980). However, it was not until Jeanette
Wing’s (2006) much-cited paper was published that the effort of making programming
into an integrated part of compulsory education became mainstream (Bocconi et al.,
2016). Wing (2006) described computational thinking as decomposition, data
representation and pattern recognition, abstractions and algorithms. Educational
research and practice has attempted to clarify and activate computational thinking as
teachable competencies. This is often done by highlighting how computational
thinking relates to mathematical processes such as abstraction, problem solving,
modelling and algorithm building (Kafai & Burke, 2013).
From a methodological perspective, we conduct an open juxtaposing (Bereday, 1967)
of different cases of including programming into schooling with focus on both the
official mathematics curriculum and the specific language used in teaching materials.
Our argument builds on case-based reasoning, in the sense that the three combinations
of teaching materials and governmental curricular documents that we look at are seen
as having the particularity of specific cases (Yin, 2011). In the following three sections,
we describe cases of how programming is included in the compulsory school in
England, Sweden and Denmark. We focus on the rules and curriculum standards that
underpin this movement and on examples of curriculum materials dedicated to support
such a change.

CASE 1: PROGRAMMING IN COMPUTING CLASS IN ENGLAND

In England, the former ICT curriculum was replaced by the ‘new’ subject of computing
in the National Curriculum of England in 2014. This new computing curriculum was
developed with the support of representatives from the industry, computer scientists,
government officials and teachers (Larke, 2019). It aimed at providing school students,
from the age of 5 onwards, with the necessary skills, knowledge and thinking to
become digital literate and be able to actively participate in a digital world. Common
computing activities in secondary classrooms in England are, for example ‘Pair
Programming’, where one pupil programs whilst the other looks on offering advice and
they swap at key points or after a certain time; ‘Debugging/Programming’, where
pupils are given some code with errors they need to fix and/or parts they need to amend
to add new functionality; and ‘Predict and test’, where students are given code snippets
they need to read (trace) and understand to predict output.
We focus on an activity (Unplugged: Polygon Predictions) taken from the
ScratchMaths (SM) project (www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/research/projects/scratchmaths),
which aimed at investigating the learning of computing alongside mathematical
concepts. The SM project team has designed an integrated curriculum to teach
mathematical ideas by using Scratch, a programming environment, targeting 9-11 year
old students (end of primary school in England). Students are presented with three
scripts and are asked to “Read each of the scripts. Draw and/or explain in words the
picture that it will create (it creates various polygons). Students may think that the

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scripts will deliver the same outcome due to the same codes being used, even if they
are not in the same order. All three scripts lead to the creation of a square with a side
of ‘50 steps’, but each square will ‘look’ different. Students would need certain
computational thinking skills to identify those differences (Ainley, 2019). The teacher
needs to model how to predict the outcome of a script, ideally after allowing students
to spend a few minutes on this themselves. The teacher would then run a class
discussion to model how to deconstruct each script. Students are expected to ‘access’
their mathematical knowledge of the properties of different polygons, in this case those
of a square. As Ainley (2019), a teacher who has used this activity with her students,
reported, “in my own experience, ScratchMaths has improved teacher subject
knowledge, computational thinking, problem-solving, and my student’s understanding
of block coding in Scratch. From a computing point of view, that’s pretty good!” (p.21).

CASE 2: PROGRAMMING IN ALGEBRA IN SWEDISH MATH CLASS

In 2017, the Swedish national curriculum was revised in order to strengthen students’
digital competence (Swedish National Agency of Education, 2018). The main idea was
to teach programming in mathematics and apply it in technology. In the mathematics
curriculum, a major part of the programming is included in the core content of algebra.
An additional item connected to algorithms is included in the core content of problem
solving. The revised curriculum is reflected in new editions of Swedish mathematics
textbooks, where stepwise instructions and algorithms have been incorporated in close
connection to the algebraic content ‘patterns’ (Bråting, Kilhamn & Rolandsson, 2020).
We provide an example of a programming activity for grades 7-9, taken from a Swedish
government-provided online material. The aim of the activity is to show how
programming can be used to explore new mathematical ideas. The task is to program
an algorithm for finding prime numbers. The idea is to use programming as a tool for
mathematical problem solving, and at the same time develop a deeper understanding
for divisibility and number sense. The activity consists of three steps. In the first step,
the students work with the algorithm ‘Sieve of Erastothenes’ with pen and paper.
Especially, the students are encouraged to discover general patterns. Some students
may even be able to conclude that they only need to investigate the numbers up to
. In the second step, the students together with the teacher are supposed to construct an
algorithm with pseudo-code that can answer whether a number is a prime or not. In the
third step, the students are to translate the pseudo-code to Python or a similar
programming language. In the material, the meaning and usage of algorithms are
discussed as a help for the teacher. It is emphasized that the algorithm can solve all
problems in a given class, and not only a procedure to solve a single problem. That is
to say that the mathematical definition of a problem is considered.

CASE 3: PROGRAMMING IN A NEW SUBJECT IN DANISH SCHOOL

The Danish government is investigating a two-tier strategy to implement programming
in compulsory school. This involves the integration of programming into a wide range

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of topics and the development of a specific topic ‘technology comprehension’ which
is being tested in Danish classrooms. The curriculum was piloted in 2017, and is
currently (2018-2021) tested in a larger project. The key learning objectives of
technology comprehension are: (1) students engage in digital production; (2) students
learn to develop, modify and evaluate digital products; and (3) students learn about the
role of informatics as a change agent in the society. Technology comprehension is
described as an individual topic as well as in relation to arts, design, science, social
science, first language and mathematics. The test curriculum standards for introducing
technology understanding in mathematics has six focus areas: (1) digital design and
design processes, (2) modelling, (3) programming, (4) data algorithms and structures,
(5) user studies and redesign, and (6) computer systems. The test curriculum for
technology comprehension as an individual topic – which we will focus on here, since
it currently seems the most likely decision regarding how to move forward after the
test phase – consists of four areas: (1) digital citizenship, (2) digital design and design
processes, (3) computational thinking, and (4) technological agency.
An example activity designed to support the work with ‘technology understanding as
its own topic’ in grade 8 is the well-known two-person hand-game ‘rock-paper-
scissors’. Students are to use data generated from playing this game to get an
understanding on how data can help with predicting future outcomes. The associated
teaching material is divided into three different stages: coincidences; from
coincidences to patterns; and challenges. In the first stage, the students will develop a
simple computer script in Python for playing ‘rock-paper-scissors’. The script will have
the player choose between 1 and 3, corresponding to the different outcomes a player
can make, likewise for the computer, but this time it will be chosen randomly. The
students reflect on data based on multiple runs and consider to what extent knowing
the probability will affect one’s game. In the second stage, the students will keep on
collecting data to see how the probability changes as a consequence of the previous
game. The students will also work with bigger sets of data and use all outcomes to
measure the probability. In the third stage, the students will use what they learned to
create a new game, where they can gather data, use it for predictions and thereby win
the game. This will show the students that a game, which has a completely random
outcome in the beginning, can be programmed so that the popabilites of certain
outcomes changes as a fuction of data about previous played games. The students will
present their program to each other and provide feedback.

JUXTAPOSING THE THREE DIFFERENT APPROACHES

The different material involves programming in various programming languages. In
none of the countries, the curriculum standards endorse specific programming
languages. Yet, while both Danish and English curricula talk about the learning
outcomes of programming activities on rather abstract terms (value for the society,
engagement in digital production), the Swedish case shows that curriculum standards
can be quite specific in relation to what type of programming language (e.g. visual
versus textual programming) the students should work with at different levels. If we
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look at the examples of teaching sequences from the different countries, they all point
to specific programming languages/environments that students and teachers should
work with. This is no surprise since the specification of course is a help in terms of
instructing teachers and students on how to handle specific difficulties and develop
specific solutions in these environments. All three cases of teaching activities point to
the ability to work with and handle algorithms as an important part of the work with
programming. In the following, we consider the cases of curriculum standards and
materials that relate to programming and computational thinking and compare how
they refer to mathematics. In order to describe the differences between the three cases
we are distinguishing between four different ways to see relations between
mathematics and programming: (1) specific relations to mathematical concepts or
processes, when a curriculum standard text or an educational resource states the
relation to a specific area of mathematics or a specific mathematical process; (2)
explicit relations to mathematics, when mathematics, mathematical working processes,
and mathematical competencies are referred to explicitly; (3) implicit relations to
mathematics, where we can interpret the activity or educational intention as embodying
mathematical work, but where this relation is not uttered in an overt way; and (4) no or
weak relations to mathematics.
The English Computing curriculum puts emphasis on students’ developing
programming skills and computational thinking, understanding and applying “the
fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic,
algorithms and data representation” (DfE, 2013, p.1), whereas the National
Mathematics curriculum in England refers to the use of ICT tools when necessary
based on the teacher’s judgement (DfE, 2014), without any reference to programming,
computational thinking or digital competencies. Therefore the computing curriculum
argues for an explicit relation to mathematics stating examples of relatively specific
relations (e.g. abstraction, logic, algorithms, data representation), but the mathematics
curriculum only refers to the use of ICT tools when necessary, and without any
mentioning of computational thinking, which suggests a documentational weak or no
relation between programming and mathematics. Even in computing lessons, the links
to mathematics may not be as strong due to the subject knowledge of the teacher, who
may or may not be a computer science specialist, and may or may not have strong
mathematical knowledge (Larke, 2019; Mee, 2020). The Scratchmaths example we
presented was an intervention especially targeting the potential that Scratch offers for
the learning of certain mathematical concepts and was chosen due to its potential to
showcase how the relations between programming and mathematics can be specific
and explicit, even if in the national curriculum documents these relations are implicit,
weak or non-existent. In the example we presented, the specific relation between the
characteristics of polygons and the ways in which a square in particular can be
constructed in Scratch are suggested. In the class discussions, students are expected to
explore and de-construct the scripts by relying both on their mathematical thinking and
competencies (knowledge of what a square is, its properties and ways to construct a
square), but also digital competencies (knowledge of Scratch language and familiarity
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with programming in Scratch), hence making the relation between programming and
mathematics explicit. Still, despite Scratchmaths being a great initiative, the current
reality in the English educational system remains as having mostly implicit, weak or
no relations between programming and mathematics in practice.
In Sweden, the connection between programming and mathematics as a subject is quite
clear. The Swedish mathematics curriculum document has incorporated programming
in the core content of algebra, but also within the mathematical problem solving
content. However, there is no explicit formulation or explanation regarding how
programming connects to algebra or algebraic concepts in the curriculum document;
in that sense the relation is explicit and relatively specific. The main focus of the
programming content in the mathematics curriculum is on algorithms. In the described
teaching activity, there is a specific relation between programming and mathematics in
the sense that the students are to learn programming as well as developing a deeper
understanding of divisibility and number sense. It is also noticeable that the students
are encouraged to discover patterns, which could be seen as a specific relation between
computational thinking and algebraic thinking. According to the instructions to the
teacher, the aim with the activity is to use programming as a tool for problem solving,
which also is in line with the mathematics curriculum document for grades 7-9. The
usage of programming as a tool for solving mathematical problems may be interpreted
as an explicit, but not specific relation between programming and mathematics in the
sense that the students do not learn mathematics primarily. The main focus in this
activity, as well as most of the activities in the government provided teaching material,
is to work with algorithms, structure and the approach of breaking down a problem in
smaller steps. This is interpreted as an explicit, non-specific relation between
programming and mathematics.
In relation to Denmark, it of course makes a difference if we talk about technology
comprehension as its own topic or as a part of mathematics. Yet, in both cases, the
relations to mathematical concepts and processes are rather unspecific. In the latter
case, there is of course an explicit relation to mathematics. Both because of the
placement of the curriculum standards in relation to the topic mathematics, but also
because the standards highlights aspects that are meaningful from a mathematical
perspective such as modelling and data algorithms and structures. The educational
material is built around a challenge that focuses on the breakdown of a well-known
game into a programmable structure. It is strongly related to algorithmic thinking and
modelling. The inferences that students make are scaffolded to move from naive
decisions based on prejudiced opinions towards inferences based on data and
probabilities. This has explicit, but not specific, relations to statistics. The design of a
game also allows the students to enact design thinking and problem solving. From a
mathematical point of view, this teaching sequence highlights statistics and
probabilities as well as modelling and problem solving. In terms of specific relations
to mathematics, these appear in the curriculum standards regarding technology
comprehension as part of mathematics, but also in the specific curriculum material

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(especially relations to statistics). When it comes to explicit but not specific relations
to mathematics, the entire version of the curriculum, where mathematics is part of
technology comprehension is exemplifying this. Implicit relations to mathematics are
present in the standards for technology comprehension as an individual topic.

CONCLUSION
In order to answer the question about the differences and similarities in the approaches
taken by England, Sweden and Denmark to incorporate programming into school, and
in particular how specific and explicit materials and curriculum standards relate
programming and computational thinking to mathematics, the materials in the
presented cases suggests two observations. The first observation is that the curriculum
standards of different countries have different disciplinary affinities to programming.
In Sweden, programming is clearly related to mathematics and the standards are both
explicitly and specifically related to algebra and programming. Neither England nor
Denmark have the same level of specificity in this relation, mainly because none of
their curriculum standards has chosen to relate programming to specific mathematical
topics. The second observation is that even though the curriculum standards differ in
specificity of the relations to mathematics, this difference cannot be seen in the
example cases of the teaching materials. Clearly, the data presented is too sparse to
allow general claims. Nevertheless, the explicit relations to mathematical problem
solving are seen in all the activities, and this together with some relatively specific
relations to mathematical content applied in the materials. In conclusion, we point to
the fact that all three countries – England, Sweden and Denmark – to some extent build
on mathematics, when introducing programming in their school curriculum. Yet, there
is a large difference in specificity as to how mathematics enters curriculum standards.

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