Background: In agile software engineering team projects, effective collaboration and communication between members are essential for promoting agility and lean software development. Agile methodologies, which emphasize iterative development, collaboration and adaptability, are well suited to dynamic educational environments. However, agile teams…

Context: Introductory programming courses often face high dropout and failure rates, a challenge widely addressed in computing education research. Collaborative methods, such as group work and pair programming, have been proposed as potential solutions, as they are believed to enhance students' study motivation. Objective: This article provides a…

Research on mental model representations developed by programmers during parallel program comprehension is important for informing and advancing teaching methods including model-based learning and visualizations. The goals of the research presented here were to determine: how the mental models of programmers change and develop as they learn…

Learning environments for programming education need a comprehensive task set that guides students from basic programming concepts to complex challenges. For creating such a task set, it is beneficial to utilize the concept of a design space--a systematic mapping of design dimensions and choices along these dimensions. We propose an iterative…

The human aspects of cyber security are fundamental as these are interlinked with processes and technology in building resilience against an evolving and complex threat landscape. It is vital to teach future cyber security specialists sufficient knowledge about human aspects in order to strengthen the defences and defend against malicious actors.…

Motivation: Students learning to program often reach states where they are stuck and can make no forward progress--but this may be outside the classroom where no instructor is available to help. In this situation, an automatically generated next-step hint can help them make forward progress and support their learning. It is important to know what…

Code quality is a critical aspect of programming, as high-quality code is easier to maintain, and code maintenance constitutes the majority of software costs. Consequently, code quality should be emphasized in programming education. While previous research has identified numerous code quality defects commonly made by students, the current state…

Automated assessment is well-established within computer science courses but largely absent from human--computer interaction courses. Automating the assessment of human--computer interaction (HCI) is challenging because the coursework tends not to be computational but rather highly creative, such as designing and implementing interactive…

Identity has received ample attention in computing education research from the viewpoint of "computing identity" and broadening participation, while more attention has been called for to clarify its role. We looked into identity development in the context of Computer Science 1 (CS1) based on Marcia's identity statuses and subsequent…

While there have been many calls for teaching ethics and responsible computing, it is unclear how responsible computing instruction and technical learning interact. Some instructors even hesitate to include ethics in their courses, fearing it might distract students from learning technical computing content. An approach called…

Explain-in-Plain-English (EiPE) questions are used by some researchers and educators to assess code reading skills. EiPE questions require students to briefly explain (in plain English) the purpose of a given piece of code, without restating what the code does line-by-line. The premise is that novices who can explain the purpose of a piece of code…

Background: Academic help-seeking benefits students' achievement, but existing literature either studies important factors in students' selection of all help resources via self-reported surveys or studies their help-seeking behavior in one or two separate help resources via actual help-seeking records. Little is known about whether computing…

Query languages are the foundations of database teaching and education practices. The broad adoption of graph databases contrasts with the limited research into how they are taught. Contrary to relational databases, graph databases allow navigational queries with higher expressivity and lack an a priori schema. In this article, we design a…

Higher education institutions are under pressure to educate employable computing graduates who can meet society's needs. Education, as a process of becoming, shapes students' identities, and identity is an important topic to study because it influences students' motivation, retention and satisfaction. Identity serves as the link connecting an…

Objectives: The traditional, instructor-led form of live coding has been extensively studied, with findings showing that this form of live coding imparts similar learning to static-code examples. However, a concern with Traditional Live Coding is that it can turn into a passive learning activity for students as they simply observe the instructor…