Recent developments in technology have changed the learner's profile and the learning outcomes. Today, with the emergence of higher-order thinking skills and computer literacy skills, teaching through traditional methods is likely to fail to achieve the learning outcomes. That is why; teachers and teacher candidates are expected to have computer…

The study presents the results of a project in which tablets and a ready-made application were used for teaching basic programming concepts to young primary school students (ages 7-9). A total of 135 students participated in the study, attending primary schools in Athens, Greece, divided into three groups. The first was taught conventionally. The…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether the authoring of computer games in a mainstream primary school setting can support the learning of game design and programming concepts. Background: Despite the benefits for students when they learn how to program and the significant body of research regarding this matter, these…

Aim/Purpose: When learning to program, both text-based and visual-based input methods are common. However, it is unclear which method is more appropriate for first-time learners (first learners). Background: The differences in the learning effect between text-based and visual-based input methods for first learners are compared the using a…

Aim/Purpose: The goal of this paper is to examine whether having female robotics teachers positively impacts girls' performance on programming and robotics tasks Background: Women continue to be underrepresented in the technical STEM fields such as engineering and computer science. New programs and initiatives are needed to engage girls in STEM…

Programming tools are being used in education to teach computer science to children as young as 5 years old. This research aims to explore young children's approaches to programming in two tools with contrasting programming interfaces, ScratchJr and Lightbot, and considers the impact of programming approaches on developing computational thinking.…

Pair programming (PP) is a useful approach to fostering computational thinking for young students. However, there are many factors impacting on the effectiveness of PP. The period of switching roles between the driver and the navigator is often ignored by researchers. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the impact of the switching period on PP.…

Background: Robotics competitions are increasingly popular and potentially provide an on-ramp to computer science, which is currently highly gender imbalanced. However, within competitive robotics teams, student participation in programming is not universal. This study gathered surveys from over 500 elementary, middle, and high school robotics…

In order to be well-educated citizens in the 21st century, children need to learn computing in school. However, implementing computing education in schools faces several practical problems, such as lack of computing teachers and time in an already overloaded curriculum. A solution can be a multidisciplinary approach, integrating computing…

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…

While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on "game construction" pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing…

The current impetus for increasing STEM in K-12 education calls for an examination of how preservice teachers are being prepared to teach STEM. This paper reports on a study that examined elementary preservice teachers' (n = 21) self-efficacy, understanding of science concepts, and computational thinking as they engaged with robotics in a science…

New generations are using and playing with mobile and computer applications extensively. These applications are the outcomes of programming work that involves skills, such as computational and algorithmic thinking. Learning programming is not easy for students children. In recent years, academic institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of…

Anthropomorphized robots are regarded as beneficial tools in education due to their capabilities of improving teaching effectiveness and learning motivation. Therefore, one major trend of research, known as Robot- Assisted Language Learning (RALL), is trying to develop robots to support teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). As…

The introduction of computer programming in K-12 has become mainstream in the last years, as countries around the world are making coding part of their curriculum. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies that investigate how learning to program at an early age affects other school subjects. In this regard, this paper compares three…