Object-oriented programming (OOP) is not only an integral part of computing degrees but also a requirement in non-computing majors such as engineering. Understanding OOP concepts can be difficult for novice programmers, and often leads to the development of misconceptions. This is exacerbated when the discipline requires students to learn a…

High-quality programming projects for education are critically required in teaching. However, it is hard to develop those projects efficiently and artificially constrained by the lecturers' experience and background. The recent popularity of large language models (LLMs) has led to a great number of applications in the field of education, but…

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies over traditional statistical methods for predicting student performance in e-learning contexts. Notably, many researchers have adopted AI techniques without conducting a comprehensive investigation into the most appropriate and accurate…

We have recently developed an automated approach to reduce students' rationalization of programming plagiarism and collusion by informing them about the matter and reporting uncommon similarities to them for each of their submissions. Although the approach has benefits, it does not greatly engage students, which might limit those benefits. To…

Teaching programming is a topic that has generated a high level of interest among researchers in recent decades. In particular, multiple approaches to teaching visual programming have been explored, from the use of tools such as Scratch, robots, unplugged programming, or activities for the development of computational thinking. Despite the wide…

Learning computer programming is a challenging process. Among the current approaches for overcoming this challenge, visual programming languages (VPLs), such as Scratch, have shown very promising results for beginners. Interestingly, some higher education institutions have started to use VPLs to introduce basic programming concepts, mainly in CS1…

Software engineers are tasked with writing functionally correct code of high quality. Maintainability is a crucial code quality attribute that determines the ease of analyzing, modifying, reusing, and testing a software component. This quality attribute significantly affects the software's lifetime cost, contributing to developer productivity and…

Raspberry Pi Pico, based on chip RP2040, is an easy-to-use development microcontroller board that can provide flexible input/output functions and meets the teaching needs of basic electronics to first-year university undergraduates. This article presents our blended laboratory design using Raspberry Pi Pico for the course unit Digital Circuits and…

Understanding the architecture of a processor can be uninteresting and deterring for computer science students, since low-level details of computer architecture are often perceived to lack real-world impact. These courses typically have a strong practical component where students learn the fundamentals of the computer architecture and the handling…

The recent push to introduce coding in early childhood education has been the subject of heated debate. A lack of theoretical and empirical research devoted to understanding coding education acceptance provided the motivation for this article. As a way to engage in the debate, this article investigated kindergarten teachers' acceptance of coding…

With the abrupt nationwide lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities suspended face-to-face activities. Some of them decided to continue their academic courses, adapting traditional approaches to online learning. An important challenge was to deliver programming labs over the Internet without important methodological changes,…

Our educational project has three primary goals. First, we want to provide a robust vision of how hardware and software interplay, by integrating the design of an instruction set (through microprogramming) and using that instruction set for assembly programming. Second, we wish to offer a versatile and interactive tool where the previous…

Jutge.org is an open educational online programming judge designed for students and instructors, featuring a repository of problems that is well organized by courses, topics, and difficulty. Internally, Jutge.org uses a secure and efficient architecture and integrates modern verification techniques, formal methods, static code analysis, and data…

The domain model is an essential part of an adaptive learning system. For each educational course, it involves educational content and semantics, which is also viewed as a form of conceptual metadata about educational content. Due to the size of a domain model, manual domain model creation is a challenging and demanding task for teachers or…

This paper presents an innovative method to tackle the automatic evaluation of programming assignments with an approach based on well-founded assessment theories (Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT)) instead of heuristic assessment as in other systems. CTT and/or IRT are used to grade the results of different items of…