The questions below are examples of some of the questions that will come to mind when working on the Ice Cream Stands problem and its variations. When students think, talk, and write about these questions, all of the four Standards at the foundation of doing mathematics are reinforced.
When you begin to look for a solution to the Ice Cream Stands problem, whether or not you choose to place an ice cream stand on a corner depends on the relationship in space between that corner, the other streetcorners indicated on the map, and the ice cream stands you have already "built". When you try to find a "best" or minimum solution for the problem, the spatial reasoning that you use becomes even more complex. Yet this particular brand of spatial reasoning is not geometric.
This is only one kind of non-geometric spatial reasoning which engages mathematicians. Other examples of different types of spatial reasoning are found in the activities with knots, graphs, finite state machines and map coloring.
The issue here is computatonal complexity. On the one hand computers have taken away much of the drudgery associated with numerical computations. But when we give a computer something to do or to count, even though they work very fast, it is still possible to give them too much!
How much is too much? You have to look at the numbers. For the ice cream stands problem, this means asking how will we go about checking all the possibilities, and how many possibilities will we have to check. This is a very interesting and complex counting task. There are many ways to do it, but they all involve a series of relatively simple steps. This means that even very young and inexperienced students can take on the task, and students of all levels can see that the count of the number of possibilities is going to get overwhelmingly large quite fast?
Counting tasks such as these abound in computer science. Very often, procedures that seem simple can explode into a huge series of tasks, too many even for a computer to do. It is important for computer scientists to develop the right kind of number sense to know when to be alert for procedures that may do that.