Background and Context: Pair programming is an important approach to fostering students' programming and collaborative learning skills. However, the empirical findings on pair programming are mixed, especially concerning effective instructional design. Objective: The objective of this literature review is to provide lecturers with systematic…

Computer science is a fast-growing field in today's digitized age, and working in this industry often requires creativity and innovative thought. An issue within computer science education, however, is that large introductory programming courses often involve little opportunity for creative thinking within coursework. The undergraduate…

Peer review is the standard process within academia for maintaining publication quality, but it is also widely employed in other settings, such as education and industry, for improving work quality and for generating actionable feedback to content authors. For example, in the software industry peer review of program source code--or peer code…

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…

Pair programming is a software development technique with many cited benefits in learning and teaching. However, it is reported that novice programmers find several barriers to pairing up, typically due to the added communication that is required of this approach. This paper will present a literature review discussing the issue of communication,…

As part of their undergraduate mathematics curriculum, students at Brock University learn to create and use computer-based tools with dynamic, visual interfaces, called Exploratory Objects, developed for the purpose of conducting pure or applied mathematical investigations. A student's Development Process Model of creating and using an Exploratory…

This review synthesises research on digital games and science learning as it supports the goals for science proficiency outlined in the report by the US National Research Council on science education reform. The review is organised in terms of these research-based goals for science proficiency in light of their alignment with current science…

This article provides a review of educational research literature focused on pair programming in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Research suggests that the benefits of pair programming include increased success rates in introductory courses, increased retention in the major, higher quality software, higher student confidence in…

A key challenge of effective teaching is assessing and monitoring the extent to which students have assimilated the material they were taught. Concept mapping is a methodology designed to model what students have learned. In effect, it seeks to produce graphical representations (called concept maps) of the concepts that are important to a given…

This paper reviews the literature related to the learning and teaching of debugging computer programs. Debugging is an important skill that continues to be both difficult for novice programmers to learn and challenging for computer science educators to teach. These challenges persist despite a wealth of important research on the subject dating…