[erroneousfunk]

I had a little bit of a problem with that question as well. A clever student might just divide 69 by three and take that number, as well as the numbers on either side, as the answer.

Is that algebra? Is that not algebra? Is that some sort of more nebulous skill that's also correlated with programming? If they actually wanted to correlate ALGEBRA algebra with programming, I also thought they'd have more straight-forward questions. Using word problems brings all sorts of other issues into the picture.

[relaytheurgency]

I would say that it requires algebraic thoughts. You are assigning a placeholder for "x" as "that number that would fit in the middle here". To me, that seems algebraic. Especially at this very, very basic level of algebra we are discussing.