In the last few years, it has been pointed out that teaching programming is a strong strategy to develop pupils' competences in computational thinking (CT). In the Portuguese context, the curriculum changes in 2018 made programming and CT compulsory for every pupil in primary and secondary education. Nowadays, there is an information and…

Intelligent tutoring systems have become increasingly common in assisting students but are often aimed at isolated subject-domain tasks without creating a scaffolding system from lower- to higher-level cognitive skills, with low-level skills often neglected. We designed and developed an intelligent tutoring system, CompPrehension, which aims to…

In evaluating the learning achievement of programming-thinking skills, the method of using a rubric that describes evaluation items and evaluation stages is widely employed. However, few studies have evaluated the reliability, validity, and consistency of the rubrics themselves. In this study, we introduced a statistical method for evaluating the…

An analysis is presented in this study that provides insight into a practical training process and its impact on teachers and their viewpoints toward the integrated STEM approach used in that training process, together with educational coding and robotics, over the first years of compulsory primary education, where STEM implementations are…

Educational robotics (ER) seems to have a positive effect on students and, in many cases, might help them to successfully assimilate knowledge and skills. Thus, this paper focuses on ER and carries out a literature review on educational robotics simulators with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The review searches for relevant papers which were…

In every course, there are learners who successfully pass assessments and complete the course. However, there are also those who fail the course for various reasons. One of such reasons may be related to success in assessment. Although performance in assessments has been studied before, there is a lack of knowledge on the degree of variance…

One of the problems regarding MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is the high dropout rate. Although dropout periods have been studied, there is still a lack of understanding of how dropout differs for MOOCs with different levels of difficulty. A quantitative study was conducted to determine the periods with the highest dropouts in computer…

In this study we have attempted, firstly, to describe programming protocols developed for the teaching of an Electromagnetism course in the university degrees of Electrical Engineering and Energy Engineering, and secondly, to evaluate students' satisfaction with the simulation practices through MATLAB® programming. The main objective of the…

Programming activities have the potential to provide a rich context for exploring measurement units in early elementary mathematics. This study examines how a small group of young children (ages 5-6) express their emergent conception of a dynamic linear unit and the measurement concepts they found challenging. Video of an introductory programming…

This study investigated the scalability of a cognitive multiple-choice test through the Mokken package in the R programming language for statistical computing. A 2019 mathematics West African Examinations Council (WAEC) instrument was used to gather data from randomly drawn K-12 participants (N = 2866; Male = 1232; Female = 1634; Mean age = 16.5…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) can potentially affect the lives of millions of people, but there is little research on how a programming MOOC could affect participants' lives after participation. In Estonia, we have organised several programming MOOCs over the years, attended by over 14,000 people. This inspired us to develop and validate a…

Finding context, examples, and ample hands-on experimentation is fundamental for understanding complex ideas in subjects such as science and math. Recent popularity of competitive robotics has become a catalyst in the development of DIY and hobby kits. Manufacturers have made available easy to work, re-configurable, and functional, structural…

The objective of this research is to study the "Scratch" programming language as a didactic tool to teach functions. The introduction of didactic tools allowing comprehension in simple and attractive ways is required. Given the traditional teaching/learning system, it is necessary to organize participatory and collaborative dynamic…

The introduction of STEM education, and specifically the implementation of educational robotics (ER), has drawn researchers' attention and has shown that teachers play a crucial role in leading this innovation. The present study concerns in-service and pre-service early childhood teachers, focusing on their perceptions and attitudes about ER use…

The GeomBot is a drawing robot that combines the well-known strengths and opportunities offered by Scratch with those of Papert's original robotic drawing-turtle. In this study we look at the GeomBot as a physical programmable artifact around which action research with a group of teachers and a researcher was carried out with the aim of designing,…