The paper discusses an alternative method of assessing the difficulty of pupils' programming tasks to determine their age appropriateness. Building a program takes the form of its successive iterations. Thus, it is possible to monitor the number of times such a program was built by the solver. The variance of the number of program builds can be…

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and…

Reintroducing computer science (CS) education in K-12 schools to promote computational thinking (CT) has attracted significant attention among scholars and educators. Among the several essential components included in CS and CT education, program debugging is an indispensable skill. However, debugging teaching has often been overlooked in K-12…

With the increasing need for the incorporation of computer science (CS) concepts into elementary and secondary education, it is imperative that the teaching workforce is adequately prepared to ensure that instruction in CS is robust, relevant, and aligned with appropriate learning standards, where appropriate. This paper shares results from a…

This paper describes a pilot study that explores students learning how to program via a multi-disciplinary approach. The study participants were eleven 6th grade students who learned programming fundamentals via music activities in a Scratch 3.0 environment. These activities included the programming of familiar melodies and the development of…

Serious games are considered an effective method to engage students in programming education and have been increasingly used in classrooms. An important part of the learning process with serious games involves the presentation of the new concepts and the provided support to encounter student difficulties. Although the most common approach is the…

The recent push to introduce coding in early childhood education has been the subject of heated debate. A lack of theoretical and empirical research devoted to understanding coding education acceptance provided the motivation for this article. As a way to engage in the debate, this article investigated kindergarten teachers' acceptance of coding…

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the introduction of programming in teacher education and professional development, highlighting its importance for the development of so-called computational thinking. This study explored primary education teachers' participation in programming practices. By focusing on their views of creating…

This study aims to reveal how project-based teaching method affects students' achievement, cognitive load and behaviors in programming teaching. In the study, the pretest-posttest, unequaled control group quasi-experimental model, which is one of the experimental models, was used. The participants of the study were sixth grade students who take…

This convergent mixed method study investigates learner engagement during a blended, transmedia curriculum called CryptoComics, which is designed to teach 3rd-5th graders about cryptology and cybersecurity. Curriculum design is presented through the lens of four engagement facilitators: (1) anchoring the curriculum with a comic book, (2) blending…

The recent shift in compulsory education from ICT-focused computing curricula to informatics, digital literacy and computer science, has resulted in children being taught computing using block-based programming tools such as Scratch, with teaching that is often limited by school resources and teacher expertise. Even without these limitations,…

The ability to categorize concepts is an essential capability for human thinking and action. On the one hand, the investigation of such abilities is the purview of psychology; on the other hand, subject-specific educational research is also of interest, as a number of research works in the field of science education show. For computer science…

This study is part of a larger design study that iteratively improves a robotics programming curriculum as well as a computational thinking (CT) instrument. Its focus was majorly on CT assessment and particularly on an online CT instrument with logging functionality that can store a student's problem-solving process by recording interactions…

While today's schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student's targeted skills, and the types of problems…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 16th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2019), held during November 7-9, 2019, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and co-organised by University Degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy.…