In this article, we seek to understand how university students learn to use programming as an instrument for 'authentic' mathematical investigations. We use the instrumental approach as a framework, focusing on how the transformation of the programming language into an instrument requires that the user develops or mobilizes multiple schemes at…

The instrumental approach is a useful theoretical lens for understanding students' learning processes with a main focus on the transformation of an artefact (a human design for a goal-directed activity) into a meaningful instrument (i.e. an artefact and schemes developed by the student). In this paper, we articulate the instrumental approach for…