An introduction to combinatorics

Abstract

This work has the intent to explain the difficulties found by teachers and student on teaching and learning combinatorics.The motivation of this work was the fact that most of the Mathematics Teachers of High School consider combinatorics as something complicated to be taught; contributing as well the fact that students are led to memorize the formulas and apply it on exercises so they can understand the subject.Initially we will show some concepts that will help the Teachers to work together with the students on the proposed activities.During the work, we will talk about Combinatorics topics without mentioning formulas that needs memorization only.The most important thing is to make the student work on a suggested problem following a guide and concepts shown and after finishing a few exercises, when the student will show the understanding of the concepts, the Teacher will tell him that he learned that concept, instead of memorizing a specific exercise.Because we know that not doing this, when this student faces a new problem, he will not be able to solve it.Thus it was elaborated a guide to solve exercises and that means a way that the Teacher can work with any proposed activity that has counting in it.Finally, it was sought with this work to show the scholars some efficient strategies that can be used on teaching Combinatorics and help the students to understand better the problems about counting, using logical reasoning and logical counting.