Developing students' algorithmic and computational thinking is currently a major objective for primary and secondary education in many countries around the globe. Literature suggests that students face at various difficulties in programming processes, because of their mental models about basic programming constructs. Arrays constitute the first…

As Japanese Ministry of Education educational mandates for implementation by 2020 press on public school administrators, teachers, students, and communities, the Sustainable Programming Education proposes strategies for addressing English and programming education curricula in the elementary and middle schools. Sustainability resides in the…

This paper reports the results of a survey with 40 students enrolled in an Android Application Development course offered during the spring semester of 2013 and 2014. The course used App Inventor to build the apps and required students to have an introduction to programming course as a prerequisite. The survey asked for demographic information and…

In this paper, we present two studies examining how high school students learn to program in a mobile, social programming environment that we have developed and deployed ("IPRO"). IPRO is delivered, with an associated curriculum, as an iPod Touch app and is freely and publicly available. We find that the affordances of mobility and…

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…

The IT-Adventures program is dedicated to increasing interest in and awareness of information technology among high school students using inquiry-based learning focused on three content areas: cyber defense, game design programming, and robotics. The program combines secondary, post-secondary, and industry partnerships in educational programming,…

From 2004-2007, the University of Memphis carried out the NSF-funded Tri-P-LETS (Three P Learning Environment for Teachers and Students) project to improve local high-school computer science curricula. The project reached a total of 58 classrooms in eleven high schools emphasizing problem solving skills, programming concepts as opposed to syntax,…

Early exposure to embedded computing systems is crucial for students to be prepared for the embedded computing demands of today's world. However, exposure to systems knowledge often comes too late in the curriculum to stimulate students' interests and to provide a meaningful difference in how they direct their choice of electives for future…

This article describes an outreach program to broaden participation in computing to include more students with visual impairments. The precollege workshops target students in grades 7-12 and engage students with robotics programming. The use of robotics at the precollege level has become popular in part due to the availability of Lego Mindstorm…

Several studies have demonstrated that games have been effectively used as an instructional strategy to motivate and engage students. This paper presents the use of the process of game development as an instructional strategy to promote higher order thinking skills. An analysis of the various aspects of game development including graphics,…