Computer programming is an important skill for engineering and computer science students. However, teaching and learning programming concepts and skills has been recognized as a great challenge to both teachers and students. Therefore, the development of effective learning strategies and environments for programming courses has become an important…

Scratch, a visual programming language, was used in many studies in computer science education. Most of them reported positive results by integrating Scratch into K-12 computer courses. However, the object-oriented concept, one of the important computational thinking skills, is not represented well in Scratch. Alice, another visual programming…

In this study, a Surface Computer Supported Cooperative Work paradigm is proposed. Recently, multitouch technology has become widely available for human-computer interaction. We found it has great potential to facilitate more awareness of human-to-human interaction than personal computers (PCs) in colocated collaborative work. However, other…

This paper investigates the impact of combining self explaining (SE) with computer architecture diagrams to help novice students learn assembly language programming. Pre- and post-test scores for the experimental and control groups were compared and subjected to covariance (ANCOVA) statistical analysis. Results indicate that the SE-plus-diagram…