Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful tool with the potential to enhance learning environments. However, effective use of new technologies in education requires a good understanding of the technology and good design for its use. Generative AI such as ChatGPT requires particularly well-designed instructions due to its ease…

Background and Context: Data science and statistics are used across a broad spectrum of professions, experience levels and programming languages. The popular scientific computing languages, such as Matlab, Python and R, were organized without using empirical methods to show evidence for or against their design choices, resulting in them feeling…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Providing appropriate feedback is important when learning to program. However, it is still unclear how different feedback strategies affect learning outcomes in programming. This study designed four different two-step programming feedback strategies and explored their impact on novice programmers' academic achievement, learning motivations, and…

Although programming is often learned through formal instruction or self-paced tutorials, informal learning, for example, through publicly available online documentation, is also a significant resource for skill development among novices. However, many novices struggle to extract useful information from documentation. This work aims to answer two…

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

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,…

Background and Context: Gender research shows that women are better at reading comprehension. Other studies indicate a lower tendency in women to choose STEM professions. Since data modeling requires reading skills and also belongs in the areas of information systems and computer science (STEM professions), these findings provoked our curiosity.…

The principles of programming language design for learning and teaching have been described and discussed for several decades. Most influential was the work of Niklaus Wirth, describing principles such as simplicity, modularity, orthogonality, and readability. So why is this still an area of fundamental disagreement among educators? Why can…

Students completing undergraduate majors in chemistry are not typically required to undergo formal training in computer programming or coding. As a result, many chemistry students are graduating without skills in understanding, writing, or manipulating computer code. This skills gap places students at a disadvantage, considering the widespread and…

It is widely recognized that debugging is challenging for novice programmers and, as such, computing educators and researchers have called for explicit debugging instruction. Debugging requires various knowledge and skills, and different students may show different strengths and weaknesses. An understanding of such individual differences is…

Introductory programming courses (CS1) are difficult for novices. Inspired by "Problem solving followed by instruction" and "Productive Failure" approaches, we define an original "necessity-driven" learning design. Students are put in an apparently well-known situation, but this time they miss an essential ingredient…

SQL compiler error messages are the primary way users receive feedback when they encounter syntax errors or other issues in their SQL queries. Effective error messages can enhance the user experience by providing clear, informative, and actionable feedback. Despite the age of SQL compilers, it still remains largely unclear what contributes to an…

Contribution: Most work on languages in computing education currently focuses on non-native speakers. In contrast, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this article is the first response to the call for research on terms that takes into account the terms used by novices in their language. Background: Terms are key factors in communication,…

The use of Scratch programming in introducing text-based programming to novices at all levels of education has gained prominence in computer science but is still hardly known among pre-service teachers. With affordances of Scratch in learning text-based programming, we present an experience report on how we supported our first-year pre-service…