Despite the importance of computer science education and computational thinking, there have been limited examples of computer science education at K-12 classrooms that authentically represents the work of computer scientists, especially programming. One reason is the lack of a measurable definition of computational thinking and a programming…

Data science surrounds us in contexts as diverse as climate change, air pollution, route-finding, genomics, market manipulation, and movie recommendations. To open the "data-science-black-box" for lower secondary school students, we developed a data science teaching unit focusing on the analysis of environmental data, which we embedded…

Programmed control systems are ubiquitous in the present-day world. In current educational practice, however, these systems are hardly being addressed, and little is known about children's spontaneous understandings about such systems. Therefore, we explored pupils' understandings prior to instruction in three concrete settings: a car park, an…

In this study, an interactive programming learning environment was built with two types of error prompt functions: 1) the key prompt and 2) step-by-step prompt. A quasi-experimental study was conducted for five weeks, in which 75 sixth grade students from disadvantaged learning environments in Taipei, Taiwan, were divided into three groups: 1) the…

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…

Scratch, a kind of visual programming software, has been widely used in instruction for primary school children. Scratch constructs a digital world for children to design, develop, and create coursework in which their creative thinking is fostered. Different instructional methods have been designed and implemented to stimulate children's creative…

Fostering students' computer programming skills has become an important educational issue in the globe. However, it remains a challenge for students to understand those abstract concepts when learning computer programming, implying the need to provide instant learning diagnosis and feedback in computer programming activities. In this study, a…

The purpose of this study was to measure the impacts of mobile serious games on fifth grade students' attitudes towards "Information Technology and Software" course and understanding of programming concepts. For this purpose, a five weeks long study was conducted in a private primary school in Turkey with randomly selected 36 fifth grade…

This study aims to investigate the influence of story creation on young EFL learners' reading performance. Action research was adopted to examine the effects of two different story reading projects in a library setting in Taiwan. Each project comprised a group of 19 young EFL learner from Grades 4 to 6 (aged 10-12). The first group's activities…

Aim/Purpose: When learning to program, both text-based and visual-based input methods are common. However, it is unclear which method is more appropriate for first-time learners (first learners). Background: The differences in the learning effect between text-based and visual-based input methods for first learners are compared the using a…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

Anthropomorphized robots are regarded as beneficial tools in education due to their capabilities of improving teaching effectiveness and learning motivation. Therefore, one major trend of research, known as Robot- Assisted Language Learning (RALL), is trying to develop robots to support teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). As…

In today`s complex and fast-evolving world, problem solving is an important skill to possess. For young children to be successful at their future careers, they need to have the "skill" and the "will" to solve complex problems that are beyond the well-defined problems that they learn to solve at schools. One promising approach…

With tightened school budgets, school administrators need to know the short term and long range effects of providing gifted programs at the elementary level. Programming opportunities in elementary school have direct impact on middle school and this, in turn impacts high school and college course selection. This study used the Early Childhood…

Pair programming is a strategy that grew out of industry and has shown promise for performance and retention in computer programming courses at universities and in industry. In this study, we examine whether pair programming is effective in K-12, what it is effective for, and how partners influence each other. We collected the data from 320 middle…