Emotions are a complex multi-faceted phenomenon. To assess the complexity of emotions from different facets, multi-modal approaches are necessary. However, multi-modal approaches are rarely used for assessing emotions, especially in the context of computer programming. This study adopts a multi-modal approach to understand the changes in students'…

This article builds on prior work that aims to measure computational learning (CL) during middle school. Since game computational sophistication (GCS) has been used as a proxy for a student's engagement in CL we build on their model to more completely describe the relationship between different types of building blocks of computer games and GCS.…

Learning to program requires perseverance, practice, and the mindset that programming skills are improved through these activities (i.e., that everyone has the potential to become good at programming). In contrast to an entity mindset, individuals with an incremental mindset believe that ability is malleable and can be improved with effort. Prior…

Low performance of nontechnical engineering students in programming courses is a problem that remains unsolved. Over the years, many authors have tried to identify the multiple causes for that failure, but there is unanimity on the fact that motivation is a key factor for the acquisition of knowledge by students. To better understand motivation, a…

Contemporary research has explored educational robotics, but it has not examined the development of computational thinking in the context of programming embodied interactions. Apart from the goal of the robot and how the robot will interact with its environment, another important aspect that should be taken into consideration is whether and how…

Computer science education efforts are expanding across the globe to equip students with the necessary computing skills for today's digital world. However, preparing students to become literate in computing activities requires the training of tens of thousands of teachers in computer science. The discrepancy between student needs and teacher…

Programming skills are an increasingly desirable asset across disciplines; however, learning to program continues to be difficult for many students. To improve pedagogy, we need to better understand the concepts that students find difficult and which have the biggest impact on their learning. Threshold-concept theory provides a potential lens on…

Learning to program, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, is a difficult undertaking for many students. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting with different introductory…

In computer science, students could benefit from exposure to critical programming concepts from multiple perspectives. Peer review is one method to allow students to experience authentic uses of the concepts in an activity that is not itself programming. In this work, we examine how to implement the peer review process in early, object-oriented…

Various software engineering (SE) curricula in higher education have started including courses on global software engineering (GSE), carried out as internationally distributed project-based courses. These courses, known for their closeness to "real-world" work experience, emphasize the importance of involving industry partners as…

This article presents two case studies aimed at exploring the use of self-explanations in the context of computational science and engineering (CSE) education. The self-explanations were elicited as students' in-code comments of a set of worked-examples, and the cases involved two different approaches to CSE education: glass box and black box. The…

Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that…

Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students' awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K--12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the…

Pedagogy has emphasized that physical representations and tangible interactive objects benefit learning especially for young students. There are many tangible hardware platforms for introducing computer programming to children, but there is limited comparative evaluation of them in the context of a formal classroom. In this work, we explore the…