This paper focuses on a historically understudied area in computing education: attending to students' *design thinking* in university-level introductory programming courses. I offer an account of one student--"Rebecca"--and her experiences and code from a second-semester course on programming concepts for engineers. Using data from both…

This paper presents field-tested improvements over an 11-year period of a large-scale "Introduction to Information Systems" core business school course and provides a framework for implementation. Engagement and learning in large-scale courses can prove challenging, especially when the class is a requirement within a business school's…

Programming is a subject that many beginning students find difficult. The PHP Intelligent Tutoring System (PHP ITS) has been designed with the aim of making it easier for novices to learn the PHP language in order to develop dynamic web pages. Programming requires practice. This makes it necessary to include practical exercises in any ITS that…

Programming assignments are commonly used in computer science education to encourage students to practice target concepts and evaluate their learning status. Ensuring students are engaged in such assignments is critical in attracting and retaining students. To this end, WebHat, a service-based program evaluation platform, is introduced in this…

Differentiated instruction in the form of tiered take-home lab exercises was implemented for students of an undergraduate-level programming course. This paper attempts to uncover the perceptions and usage patterns of students toward these new lab exercises using a comprehensive survey. Findings reveal that these tiered exercises are generally very…

This article provides insight into how computing majors experience the process of doing programming assignments in their first programming course. This grounded theory study sheds light on the various processes and contexts through which students constantly assess their self-efficacy as a programmer. The data consists of a series of four…

Parson's programming puzzles are a family of code construction assignments where lines of code are given, and the task is to form the solution by sorting and possibly selecting the correct code lines. We introduce a novel family of Parson's puzzles where the lines of code need to be sorted in two dimensions. The vertical dimension is used to order…

This article presents an investigation into the usage of shareable feedback tags as a way of delivering feedback to three different cohorts of programming students. A series of research questions are examined; these include investigating any perceived benefit from students using feedback tags and exploring how students interact with their…

How does early feedback change the programming problem solving in an online environment and help students choose correct approaches? This study was conducted in a sample of students learning programming in an online course entitled Introduction to C++ and OOP (Object Oriented Programming) using the ANGEL learning management system platform. My…

Students now have at their disposal a range of Web 2.0 authoring forms such as audio and video podcasting, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual world activities and wiki writing. Many university educators are interested in enabling students to demonstrate their learning by creating content in these forms. However, the design…

This paper outlines the architecture for an online assessment management system implemented at the University of Southern Queensland. The system assists teams of academics in the management and marking of electronically submitted student assignments in large-scale classes. The system designed to provide a flexible yet structured method for…