Walid Soltani’s scientific contributions

This article is interested in the teaching and learning of the notions recurrent algorithm and recursion in the 4thyear secondary school class, computer science section. Our main aim is to identify the difficulties and obstacles encountered by students when introducing these concepts in computer science classes. This work has enabled us to obtain several results, the most important of which relate to the complexity of these concepts, the fundamental link between algorithms and mathematical problem solving never being clearly explained in the new Computer Science curricula and the wide variety of formulations and limited understanding of the treatment of recurrent algorithms.

Our paper reports on the the fondations of inductive reasoning, more precisely, the reasons for the conflicts betwen several scientists around the place, the notion of induction and its role in differents sciences, in particular mathematics. We start from an epistemological and didactic reflection of this reasoning to understand this concept. First, we present the epistemological problem of induction in relation to its meaning and validity. These problems highlight the complexity of induction.This leads us,in a second step, to set up a typology of the notion of induction developed by philosophers,linguists,empiricists and mathematicians. Finally ,we present a didactic analysis of mathematical induction which highlights the specific comprehension difficulties of learners and emphasizes the interaction between mathematics and computer science , in particular the relationship between mathematical induction and recursion.