Given the increasing needs of employees with computational skills, understanding the core competencies of K-12 computer science (CS) education is vital. This phenomenological research aims to identify critical factors of CS education in K-12 schools from the perspectives and visions of CS faculties in higher education and teachers in K-12 schools.…

Educational robotics (ER) seems to have a positive effect on students and, in many cases, might help them to successfully assimilate knowledge and skills. Thus, this paper focuses on ER and carries out a literature review on educational robotics simulators with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The review searches for relevant papers which were…

The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth's book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught,…

The emphasis on programming and robotics owing to the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the African continent has led the South African National Department of Education to propose a new subject in Grades R to 9. Hence, the training and development of pre-service teachers is crucial so that they can respond to the skills needed in…

The Arduino microcontroller enables ordinary people to perform professional tasks that only traditional engineering professionals could perform. Recently, several educational cases have been applied to primary and secondary schools, which is a desirable attempt to popularize engineering education. This study meta-analyzed the effects of…

SCRATCH, developed by the Media Lab at MIT, is a kid-friendly visual programming language, designed to introduce programming to children and teens in a "more thinkable, more meaningful, and more social" way. Although it was initially intended for K-12 students, educators have used it for higher education as well, and found it…

EvoluZion is a forward-in-time genetic simulator developed in Java and designed to perform real time simulations on the evolutionary history of virtual organisms. These model organisms harbour a set of 13 genes that codify an equal number of phenotypic features. These genes change randomly during replication, and mutant genes can have null,…

Computational thinking (CT) uses concepts that are essential to computing and information science to solve problems, design and evaluate complex systems, and understand human reasoning and behavior. This way of thinking has important implications in computer sciences as well as in almost every other field. Therefore, we contend that CT should be…