Evidence in South Africa of poor performance on word problems points to particular challenges among learners relating to difficulties with, on the one hand, making sense of mathematical word problems and, on the other, moving beyond inefficient counting based calculation methods. While many studies in mathematics education in South Africa have…

Coding and computational thinking have recently become compulsory skills in many school systems globally. Teaching these new skills presents a challenge for many teachers. A notable example of professional development designed using Constructionist principles to address this challenge is "ScratchEd". Upon reflecting on her experiences…

In this paper we report our experiences from a University outreach program with primary and secondary education teachers of various specialties. Our goal was to improve the coding abilities of teachers through Scratch activities. The participants can in turn teach their students, multiplying that way the benefitted population. To increase the…

Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves.…

Coding, once considered an arcane craft practiced by solitary techies, is now recognized by educators and theorists as a crucial skill, even a new literacy, for all children. Programming is often promoted in K-12 schools as a way to encourage "computational thinking"--which has now become the umbrella term for understanding what computer…

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in…

This meta-analysis provides an extensive and organized summary of intervention studies in education that are grounded in motivation theory. We identified 74 published and unpublished papers that experimentally manipulated an independent variable and measured an authentic educational outcome within an ecologically valid educational context. Our…

This paper examines the idea that contemporary strategic board games represent an informal, interactional context in which complex computational thinking takes place. When games are collaborative--that is, a game requires that players work in joint pursuit of a shared goal--the computational thinking is easily observed as distributed across…

Computer task automation is part of the natural progression of encoding information. This thesis considers the automation process to be a question of whether it is possible to automatically learn the encoding based on the behavior of the system to be described. A variety of representation languages are considered, as are means for the learner to…

This paper reports on part of a wider study on the teaching and learning of the conventions of formal algebraic notation. Through the analysis of paper tasks given to teachers I argue that not only does the inherent mathematical structure have an effect on the way in which an equation is manipulated but also the visual impact of notation itself.…