OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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<p>To understand the connections students make between discrete and continuous systems and how computation supports those connections, we present a case study of one student. This participant took a junior-level quantum mechanics course and the accompanying computational lab course. The following year, she became an undergraduate TA for that computational lab course. In a video elicitation interview, the participant watched a video clip of herself when she was a student working on a computational activity with a partner. She was asked to reflect on her experience with the task both as a student and as a TA. From this interview, we have identified some of the challenges and affordances of using computational activities for facilitating students’ connections between discrete and continuous systems. Challenges included understanding functions as arrays in the context of computation and the contextual meaning of mathematical objects like Δx.</p>
