Explain-in-Plain-English (EiPE) questions are used by some researchers and educators to assess code reading skills. EiPE questions require students to briefly explain (in plain English) the purpose of a given piece of code, without restating what the code does line-by-line. The premise is that novices who can explain the purpose of a piece of code…

Understanding the emotions experienced by programming students, particularly concerning gender and education level, is increasingly critical. However, only limited research has used text data to examine these differences within the context of programming education and emotions. This study aims to determine programming students' emotions and any…

Many academic teachers present data as static graphics in their lectures and courses. However, data structures have become more complex in the last decades, especially in the biomedical disciplines, and interactive graphics can provide a better means to communicate the scientific contents to students. Besides, the technological qualifications of…

Many areas of mathematics naturally lend themselves to machine-based computing environments, which suggests that computational environments may serve as useful mediating tools for the teaching and learning of mathematical content. While some mathematics classes are leveraging the use of computational tools, the implementation of computer…

Recently, creativity has been acknowledged for its importance in improving computer science learning and attitudes. However, very little is known about how to integrate creativity in preservice teacher computing education. Toward this end, we developed a creativity-enhancement intervention in an online Creative Computing instructional module to…

"Stochastic programs," which are programs that produce probabilistic output, are a pivotal paradigm in various areas of CS education from introductory programming to machine learning and data science. Despite their importance, the problem of automatically grading such programs remains surprisingly unexplored. In this paper, we formalize…

Concurrency is often perceived as difficult by students. One reason for this may be due to the fact that abstractions used in concurrent programs leave more situations undefined compared to sequential programs (e.g., in what order statements are executed), which makes it harder to create a proper mental model of the execution environment. Students…

This paper introduces a teaching process to develop students' problem-solving and programming efficacy in an introductory computer programming course. The proposed teaching practice provides step-by-step guidelines on using worked-out examples of code to demonstrate the applications of programming concepts. These coding demonstrations explicitly…

A wide range of benefits have been posited from participation in competitive programming contests. However, an analysis of participation in north American regional contests in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shows that participation in these contests is sharply declining, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover,…

In this article, we seek to understand how university students learn to use programming as an instrument for 'authentic' mathematical investigations. We use the instrumental approach as a framework, focusing on how the transformation of the programming language into an instrument requires that the user develops or mobilizes multiple schemes at…

University students in other disciplines without prior knowledge in statistics and/or programming language are introduced to the statistical method of decision trees in the programming language R during a 45-minute teaching and practice session. Statistics and programming skills are now frequently required within a wide variety of research fields…

This article offers a case study of how platforms and predictive infrastructures are emerging in higher education. It examines a Learning Analytics Application Programming Interface (API) from a popular Learning Management System. The API is treated firstly as an artefact based on the computational abstraction of educational principles, and…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Project-based learning (PBL) engages students deeply with course concepts and empowers them to drive their own learning through the development of solutions to real-world challenges. By taking ownership of and completing a project that they designed, students develop and demonstrate creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration skills. This…

Continuing to fill the literature gap, this research replicated and expands a prior study of student performance in database normalization in an introductory database course. The data was collected from four different universities, each having different prerequisite courses for their database course. Student performance on a database normalization…