With the increased reliance on technology, computer programming has emerged as an essential skill that is interesting to many audiences beyond merely computer scientists. As a result, many students from various disciplines take first-year computer science courses. This led to classrooms with a lot of diversity in student motivation, backgrounds,…

Students vary in their perceptions of teachers' motivational supports, even within the same classroom, but it is unclear why this is the case. To enable the design of equitable environments and understand the theoretical nature of motivational climate, this study explored demographic differences in university students' perceptions of instruction…

The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of the design of a first year introduction to digital fluency course primarily for a library and information technology cohort at a Canadian university using an educational action research method and apply the findings to the second "question-plan-observe-evaluate" cycle of the action…

Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry's model for intellectual development. The results show that students can…

Computer Science 1 (CS1), the first course taken by college-level computer science (CS) majors, has traditionally suffered from high failure rates. Efforts to understand this phenomenon have considered a wide range of predictors of CS success, such as prior programming experience, math ability, learning style, and gender, with findings that are…

Traditionally, learning resources are created by an instructor and distributed to their students. A contributing-student pedagogy (CSP) is one in which this responsibility shifts, placing students in control of creating the resources and sharing them with their peers. Technology plays a central role in supporting the collection and distribution of…

An e-learning discussion forum, an essential component of today's e-learning systems, offers a platform for social learning activities. However, as learners participate in the discussion forum, privacy emerges as a major concern. Privacy concerns in social learning activities originate from one learner's inability to convey a desired presentation…

A verbal and e-mail survey was conducted of 30 senior high teachers in Alberta who teach computer programming courses in the Career and Technology Studies curriculum, in order to ascertain what courses at the intermediate and advanced levels were being offered, what programming languages were being used, why teachers selected the particular…