This paper focuses on a historically understudied area in computing education: attending to students' *design thinking* in university-level introductory programming courses. I offer an account of one student--"Rebecca"--and her experiences and code from a second-semester course on programming concepts for engineers. Using data from both…

In this paper, I discuss undergraduate students' engagement in basic Python programming while solving combinatorial problems. Students solved tasks that were designed to involve programming, and they were encouraged to engage in activities of prediction and reflection. I provide data from two paired teaching experiments, and I outline how the task…

Creating explanations is an important process for students, not only to make connections between novel information and background knowledge, but also to be able to communicate their understanding of any given topic. This article explores students' explanations in the context of computational science and engineering, an important interdisciplinary…