This article describes an introductory computational thinking (CT) lesson that was implemented into five educational technology classes at a large university in the southern United States. A total of 88 undergraduate and graduate students participated in the lesson. The project was the result of a collaboration between education faculty and a…

Abstraction is a key concept in CS, one of the most fundamental ideas underlying CS and its practice. However, teaching this soft concept to novices is a very difficult task, as discussed by many CSE experts. This paper discusses this issue, and suggests a general framework for teaching abstraction in CS to novices, a framework that would fit into…

This paper focuses on challenges in mentoring software development projects in the high school and analyzes difficulties encountered by Computer Science teachers in the mentoring process according to Shulman's Teacher Knowledge Base Model. The main difficulties that emerged from the data analysis belong to the following knowledge sources of…

From 2004-2007, the University of Memphis carried out the NSF-funded Tri-P-LETS (Three P Learning Environment for Teachers and Students) project to improve local high-school computer science curricula. The project reached a total of 58 classrooms in eleven high schools emphasizing problem solving skills, programming concepts as opposed to syntax,…

In this study half of 52 sixth graders learned to program in MSWLogo and the other half in Drape. An analysis of students' test scores revealed that Drape (an iconic language) seemed to have a steeper learning curve than MSWLogo (a textual language). However, as students gradually became more familiar with either language, the difference in…