Combien? a Software to Teach Students How to Solve Combinatorics Exercises

In the Combien? (How Many?) project, we built pedagogical interfaces to help students to learn combinatorics. In this paper, we situate combinatorics teaching in the French curriculum and define a pedagogical objective. Then, we present the solving method on which the interfaces are based. Combinatorics problems are classified according to their solving schemata. Each interface corresponds to a class of problems. It allows the student to build a solution and detects the errors incrementally. Then, we show the pedagogical progression inherent to the use of these interfaces. Finally we describe the experiments in different contexts (learners, teachers).