Illinois State University Mathematics Department MAT 305:
Combinatorics Topics for K-8 Teachers Dr. Roger Day
(email@example.com) Interest in computer science and the use of
computer applications, together with connections to many real-
world situations, have helped make topics of discrete
mathematics more commonplace in school and college curricula. A
topic of widespread application and interest is combinatorics,
the study of counting techniques. Enumeration, or counting, may
strike one as an obvious process that a student learns when
first studying arithmetic. But then, it seems, very little
attention is paid to further developments in counting as the
student turns to "more difficult" areas in mathematics, such as
algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. . . . Enumeration
[however] does not end with arithmetic. It also has applications
in such areas as coding theory, probability, and statistics (in
mathematics) and in the analysis of algorithms (in computer
science). [Ralph P. Grimaldi, in Discrete and