Learning programming is a painful process for most students, especially those learning text- based programming languages. In this study, based on the principle of Bandura's social learning theory, the vicarious real-life experiences of several pioneers in the field of IT and programming were presented as 15-minutes stories to a group of 9th…

This study compares the effects of object-oriented and robot programming activities on programming achievement, abstraction, problem solving, and motivation. In the study, two consecutive experimental cases were conducted to examine the consistency of findings. The research sample comprises 81 tenth-grade students undergoing vocational secondary…

As oil is the fuel of the industrial society, software is the fuel of our current information society. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be more demand for computing jobs in the future. By 2024, more than one million computing jobs will be available. Statistics show that there is more demand for computing jobs than there is a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of employing self-explanation learning strategy supported with Worked Examples on acquiring computer programing skills among freshmen high school students. The study adopted a quasi-experimental method, where an experimental group (n = 33) used the self-explanation strategy supported with worked…

Video viewing can be a valuable resource to expose students to large quantities of input so they can improve their vocabulary and content comprehension. Most studies so far have used short clips and have not explored in much detail the effects of individual differences (IDs) such as aptitude, listening skills and vocabulary size. This paper aims…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

This paper explores the use of a constructivist 21st-century learning model to implement a week-long workshop, delivered as a "hackathon," to encourage preuniversity teenagers to pursue careers in STEM, with a particular emphasis on computer science. For Irish preuniversity students, their experience of computing can vary from word…

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of different collaborative group formations (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous in terms of prior computer knowledge levels) for learning complex tasks in computer programming from the perspective of cognitive load theory. Web-based learning platform was used to…

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…

Programming concepts are important and challenging to novices who are beginning to study computer programming skills. In addition to the textbook content, students usually learn the concepts of programming from the web; however, it could be difficult for novice learners to effectively derive helpful information from such non-structured open…

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…

Schools everywhere are using robotics education to engage kids in applied science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities, but teaching programming can be challenging due to lack of resources. This article reports on using Robot Virtual Worlds (RVW) and curriculum available on the Internet to teach robot programming. It also…

This work investigates the effectiveness of simulated robots as tools to support the learning of programming. After the completion of a systematic review and exploratory research, a multi-case case study was undertaken. A simulator, named Kebot, was developed and used to run four 10-hour programming workshops. Twenty-three student participants…

Computer science proficiency continues to grow in importance, while the number of students entering computer science-related fields declines. Many rich programming environments have been created to motivate student interest and expertise in computer science. In the current study, we investigated whether a recently created environment, Robot…

In this paper, we present two studies examining how high school students learn to program in a mobile, social programming environment that we have developed and deployed ("IPRO"). IPRO is delivered, with an associated curriculum, as an iPod Touch app and is freely and publicly available. We find that the affordances of mobility and…