Second-grade Students’ Use of Visual Programming to Learn Multiplication: Leveraging the Concept of Iteration

Abstract

The multiplication algorithms that we teach elementary students are designed to be efficient, but the conceptual understanding of these algorithms is usually hidden behind this efficiency. For example, one intuitive meaning of multiplication is that of iterated addition. In this paper, we investigate the ways a visual programming activity leverages the concept of iteration to learn multiplication. We report results of a mixed-methods study on second-grade students’ use of visual programming and iteration to set up and solve multiplication story problems. We found qualitative evidence that participants gained improved intuition of multiplication as repeated addition and that they made important connections between the programming blocks and multiplication story problems.