An Analysis of Mathematics Education Students' Skills in the Process of Programming and Their Practices of Integrating It into Their Teaching

Recent developments in technology have changed the learner's profile and the learning outcomes. Today, with the emergence of higher-order thinking skills and computer literacy skills, teaching through traditional methods is likely to fail to achieve the learning outcomes. That is why; teachers and teacher candidates are expected to have computer literacy skills. Programming is the main focus of this study since it is an important part of computer literacy. The study aims to analyze mathematics education students' skills in the process of programming and their practices of integrating it into their teaching. The participants of the study are 42 third grade students of an Elementary Mathematics Education Program of a state university in Turkey. Within the study in which theory and practice was carried out simultaneously, the participants were taught the basics of programming and the algorithms with C programming language. The teacher candidates put the theoretical knowledge into practice using the visual programming application by MIT App Inventor at the computer laboratory. In addition, they used the MIT App Inventor visual programming environment to develop programs they will use in teaching mathematics in groups. Given the component of teaching of programming during this process, it is considered that the process of teaching in question will be effective in planning the teaching process of future studies. The reason is that not only it analyses the development of the variables used in this study but also because it takes into consideration the opinions of teacher candidates.