Background: Studies on the effectiveness of block-based environments continue to produce inconsistent results. A strong reason for this is that most studies compare environments that are not equivalent to each other or to the level of learners. Moreover, studies that present evidence of the effectiveness of block-based environments by comparing…

Learning programming logic remains an obstacle for students from different academic fields. Considered one of the essential disciplines in the field of Science and Technology, it is vital to investigate the new tools or techniques used in the teaching and learning of Programming Language. This work presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on…

One of the aspects of programming that novices often struggle with is the understanding of abstract concepts, such as variables, loops, expressions, and especially Boolean operations. This paper aims to explore the effects of programming tools with different degrees of embodiment on learning Boolean operations in elementary school. To this end, 67…

Aim/Purpose: This paper focuses on designing and implementing the rubric for objective JAVA programming assessments. An unsupervised learning approach was used to group learners based on their performance in the results obtained from the rubric, reflecting their learning ability. Background: Students' learning outcomes have been evaluated…

Evaluating the quality of students' programs is necessary for better teaching and learning. Although many innovative learning environments for computer science have been introduced, the scarcity of program evaluation frames and tools is a demanding issue in the teaching practice. This study examined the quality of students' Scratch programs by…

The current quantitative study, a naturalistic field experiment, was conducted in a public primary school in Soweto, Johannesburg, with the objective to examine how children's achievement on four assessments at the beginning of Grade R, namely their numeracy, their mathematics-specific vocabulary, their executive functions, and their logical…

The first obstacles to overcome when a student has to face the task of programming for the first time are the abstraction level, the comprehension of a language with unfamiliar concepts for him/her and the specific syntax for each programming language. This work presents the qualitative results obtained in a study focused on the gain of skills for…

This paper presents an approach to the initial programming learning using the four components instructional model and the Alice software. The quasi-experimental design was developed with two groups of students that attended two schools with very different socioeconomic status and school retention levels. The differences obtained in the mean of the…

Computer programming has been gradually emphasized in recent computer literacy education and regarded as a requirement for all middle school students in some countries. To understand young students' perceptions about their own learning in computer programming, this study aimed to develop an instrument, Computer Programming Self-Efficacy Scale…

Research indicates that understanding levels of abstraction (LOA) and being able to move between the levels is essential to programming success. For K-5 contexts we rename the LOA levels: problem, design, code and running the code. In our qualitative exploratory study, we interviewed five K-5 teachers on their uses of LOA, particularly the design…

This study explores students' cognitive processes while debugging programs by using an eye tracker. Students' eye movements during debugging were recorded by an eye tracker to investigate whether and how high- and low-performance students act differently during debugging. Thirty-eight computer science undergraduates were asked to debug two C…

Computational thinking (CT) uses concepts that are essential to computing and information science to solve problems, design and evaluate complex systems, and understand human reasoning and behavior. This way of thinking has important implications in computer sciences as well as in almost every other field. Therefore, we contend that CT should be…

Aim/Purpose: Research shows that students encounter difficulties in identifying the structure of argumentation texts and in understanding the main message of the argument. The research examined the effect that learning Logic Programming (LP), while applying logic inference, has on students' understanding of argumentation texts. Background:…

The world all around us is rapidly developing. We are witnessing the rapid evolution of technology and communication. This means new challenges and responsibilities to future strategies and attitudes. Today's operating systems and development environments apply the principle of OOP; therefore today's developments are inconceivable without the…

Numerous studies document high drop-out and failure rates for students in computer programming classes. Studies show that even when some students pass programming classes, they still do not know how to program. Many factors have been considered to explain this problem including gender, age, prior programming experience, major, math background,…