The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth's book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught,…

The importance of computational thinking (CT) as a 21st-century skill for future generations has been a key consideration in the reforms of many national and regional educational systems. Much attention has been paid to integrating CT into the traditional subject classrooms. This paper describes a scoping review of learning tools for integrating…

Several instructional approaches have been advanced for learning programming. However, effective ways of engaging beginners in programming in K-12 are still unclear, especially among low socioeconomic status learners in technology-deprived learning environments. Understanding the learning path of novice programmers will bridge this gap and explain…

The Arduino microcontroller enables ordinary people to perform professional tasks that only traditional engineering professionals could perform. Recently, several educational cases have been applied to primary and secondary schools, which is a desirable attempt to popularize engineering education. This study meta-analyzed the effects of…

SCRATCH, developed by the Media Lab at MIT, is a kid-friendly visual programming language, designed to introduce programming to children and teens in a "more thinkable, more meaningful, and more social" way. Although it was initially intended for K-12 students, educators have used it for higher education as well, and found it…

The rapid expansion of computer science (CS) instruction in primary and secondary education has highlighted the shortage of teachers qualified to teach the subject. A key strategy for building CS teaching capacity has been preparing teachers of other subjects (e.g., math, technology applications, business) to teach introductory CS through…

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…

Computing in some form touches nearly every aspect of day to day life and is reflected in the ubiquitous use of cell phones, the expansion of automation into many industries, and the vast amounts of data that are routinely gathered about people's health, education, and buying habits. Computing is now a part of nearly every occupation, not only…

The success of university-level education depends on the quality of underlying school education and any deficiency therein may be detrimental to a student's career. This may be more glaring with Computer Science education, given its mercurial nature. In the developing countries, the Computer Science school curricula are usually stuffed with…

EvoluZion is a forward-in-time genetic simulator developed in Java and designed to perform real time simulations on the evolutionary history of virtual organisms. These model organisms harbour a set of 13 genes that codify an equal number of phenotypic features. These genes change randomly during replication, and mutant genes can have null,…

Computational thinking (CT) uses concepts that are essential to computing and information science to solve problems, design and evaluate complex systems, and understand human reasoning and behavior. This way of thinking has important implications in computer sciences as well as in almost every other field. Therefore, we contend that CT should be…

Novice learners find motion as a continuous process of change challenging to understand. In this paper, we present a pedagogical approach based on agent-based, visual programming to address this issue. Integrating agent-based programming, in particular, Logo programming, with curricular science has been shown to be challenging in previous research…

Tangible programming tools enable children to easily learn the programming process, previously considered to be difficult for them. While various tangible programming tools have been developed, there is still a lack of available tools to help students experience the general programming process. This study therefore developed a tool called…

Game-based learning harnesses the advantages of computer games technology to create a fun, motivating and interactive virtual learning environment that promotes problem-based experiential learning. Such an approach is advocated by many commentators to provide an enhanced learning experience than those based on traditional didactic methods.…

With the current curriculum focus on correlating classroom problem solving lessons to real-world contexts, are LEGO robotics an effective problem solving tool? This present study was designed to investigate this question and to ascertain what problem solving strategies primary students engaged with when working with LEGO robotics and whether the…