The teaching and learning of programming are often considered a difficult topic for both teachers and students, due to its complexity and abstract nature. The traditional teaching approaches are unable to contribute substantially to the development of the necessary cognitive models by the students, producing high rates of failure and dropout in…

Various aspects of computational thinking (CT) could be supported by educational contexts such as simulations and video-games construction. In this field study, potential differences in student motivation and learning were empirically examined through students' code. For this purpose, we performed a teaching intervention that took place over five…

The results presented in this paper contribute to research on two different areas of teaching methods: distributed pair programming (DPP) and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). An evaluation study of a DPP system that supports collaboration scripts was conducted over one semester of a computer science course. Seventy-four students…

The combination of Open Sim and Scratch4OS can be a worthwhile innovation for introductory programming courses, using a Community of Inquiry (CoI) model as a theoretical instructional design framework. This empirical study had a threefold purpose to present: (a) an instructional design framework for the beneficial formalization of a virtual…

Computer Science (CS) courses comprise both Programming and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) issues; however these two areas have substantial differences, inter alia the attitudes and beliefs of the students regarding the intended learning content. In this research, factors from the Social Cognitive Theory and Unified Theory of…