Background and Context: Students' programming projects are often assessed on the basis of their tests as well as their implementations, most commonly using test adequacy criteria like branch coverage, or, in some cases, mutation analysis. As a result, students are implicitly encouraged to use these tools during their development process (i.e., so…

Design patterns for learning are about articulating, testing and sharing the principles of problem solving in the educational context. In this way, multiple patterns are developed to solve common problems, described in various pattern language formats. Therefore, this work is about characterizing and establishing functional relationships between…

This paper undertakes a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT's code generation capabilities, contrasting them with those of human programmers from both educational and software engineering standpoints. The emphasis is placed on elucidating its importance in these intertwined domains. To facilitate a robust analysis, we curated a novel dataset comprising…

Educational curricula in data analysis are increasingly fundamental to statistics, data science, and a wide range of disciplines. The educational literature comparing coding syntaxes for instruction in data analysis recommends utilizing a simple syntax for introductory coursework. However, there is limited prior work to assess the pedagogical…

Debugging is essential for identifying and rectifying errors in programming, yet time constraints and students' trivialization of errors often hinder progress. This study examines differences in debugging challenges and strategies among students with varying computational thinking (CT) competencies using weekly coding journals from an online…

Conversational user interfaces (CUI), including voice interfaces, which allow users to converse with computers via voice, are gaining wide popularity. VoiceBots allow users to receive a response in real-time, regardless of the communication device. VoiceBots have been explored in fields such as customer service to automate repetitive queries and…

Many areas of mathematics naturally lend themselves to machine-based computing environments, which suggests that computational environments may serve as useful mediating tools for the teaching and learning of mathematical content. While some mathematics classes are leveraging the use of computational tools, the implementation of computer…

Contribution: Students' problem-understanding abilities and their relationship with programming learning were investigated using a methodology little explored in the existing literature. Background: Problem comprehension is an ability used during software development. Current research points to conflicting results on students' ability to interpret…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Aim/Purpose: This paper is part of a multi-case study that aims to test whether generative AI makes an effective coding assistant. Particularly, this work evaluates the ability of two AI chatbots (ChatGPT and Bing Chat) to generate concise computer code, considers ethical issues related to generative AI, and offers suggestions for how to improve…

Automatic program repair (APR) tools are valuable for students to assist them with debugging tasks since program repair captures the code modification to make a buggy program pass the given test-suite. However, the process of manually generating catalogs of code modifications is intricate and time-consuming. This article proposes contextual error…

Background and Context: Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, such tools do not identify plagiarism, nor suggest what assignment submissions are suspicious of plagiarism. Source code plagiarism…

Background and Context: Efforts to engage adult learners in computer science in the United States have been largely unsuccessful. While research examining the use of music for teaching computer programming with K-12 learners is emerging, little research with adult learners exists. Objective: This study evaluates the effect of computer coding…

When the new programming language Pascal was developed in the 1970's, Walter Gander did not like it because because many features which he appreciated in prior programming languages were missing in Pascal. For example the block structure was gone, there were no dynamical arrays, no functions or procedures were allowed as parameters of a procedure,…

We discuss our experience in teaching data analytics, and in particular prescriptive analytics, to students in business schools using an inter-coherent case study, where a managerial decision is decomposed into a series of research problems with interlocking analyses and the outcome of one analysis is the input of other analysis. Students who…