In the last two decades, computational thinking has gained wide relevance in international educational systems. The inclusion of this new type of thinking poses educational challenges with some underlying research questions that need to be answered to meet these challenges with quality. Thus, this study focuses on analyzing the difficulties that…

Educational technologists and practitioners have made substantial strides in developing affordable digital and tangible resources to support both formal and informal computer science instruction. However, there is a lack of research on practice-based assignments, such as Internet of Things (IoT) projects, that allow undergraduate students to…

Laboratory automation and data science are valuable new skills for all chemists, but most pedagogical activities involving automation to date have focused on upper-level coursework. Herein, we describe a combined computational and experimental lab suitable for a first-year undergraduate general chemistry course, in which these topics are…

Human beings by nature have a predisposition towards learning and the exploration of the natural world. We are intrinsically intellectual and social beings knitted with adaptive cognitive architectures. As Foot (2014) succinctly sums it up: "humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions" and they…

Background: As one of the mainstream forms of programming education, educational robotics (ER) have been a crucial way to develop K-12 students' programming ability. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to clarify the content of programming ability, to verify the effectiveness of ER as a teaching method to improve students' programming…

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…

This paper reports on CodeOrama, a visualization tool that displays the entire source code in a two-dimensional representation created to support the representation of a complex code in block-based programming environments, like Scratch, by using a two-dimension table. CodeOrama can be used by the students for the development of their programs as…

An educational computer game is presented, used for beginner students to introduce some basic concepts of code execution and code writing. In this mini-language microworld game, a code should be written with which a robot can escape from a procedurally generated labyrinth. The game uses a simple language and utilizes a virtual environment, where…

Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing,…

The study aims to compare the effect of a structured versus an unstructured educational robotics (ER) curriculum on (a) the frequency and type of programming errors made by students in block-based programming, (b) their ability to debug a programme, and (c) their engagement in the learning process. The authors' hypothesis is that, in programming…

The emphasis on programming and robotics owing to the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the African continent has led the South African National Department of Education to propose a new subject in Grades R to 9. Hence, the training and development of pre-service teachers is crucial so that they can respond to the skills needed in…

In this research, the effects of individual and teamwork activities on perceptions of block-based programming self-efficacy and attitudes towards robotic programming tried to be determined. The research has conducted in a private school located in Sariyer, district of Istanbul province in the 2nd academic year of 2018-2019 with 32 students from…

This study aims to explore an educational learning environment that supports students to learn conceptual modelling with the unified modelling language (UML). In this study, we call the describing models "UML programming." In this paper, we show an educational UML programming environment for science, technology, engineering, art, and…

This paper describes a 54-hour summer institute for grades 6-12 mathematics and science teachers (N = 19) with a comprehensive approach to preparing teachers to use computational thinking (CT) in their classrooms, including training in Python computer programming with Lego® Mindstorms® robotics, mathematics content sessions, and opportunities to…