Programmed control systems are ubiquitous in the present-day world. In current educational practice, however, these systems are hardly being addressed, and little is known about children's spontaneous understandings about such systems. Therefore, we explored pupils' understandings prior to instruction in three concrete settings: a car park, an…

RoblockLLy is an educational robotics simulator designed for primary and secondary school students, whose goal is to increase their interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In the particular case of computer science, it allows developing computational thinking skills. It has been designed with ease of use in mind. This free…

Recent years have witnessed an increasing emphasis on integrating computational thinking into school curriculums. This study deals with suggesting a course model including data collection tools for evaluating teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in teaching computational thinking via teaching robot programming. Taking the advantages of virtual…

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots…

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…

Contribution: Prior studies on tangible versus graphical user interfaces have reported controversial findings concerning children's preferences. This paper shows that their preference profiles in the domain of introductory programming are associated with gender and age for both interfaces. Background: The relevant literature mainly consists of…

Internationally mathematical modeling is garnering more attention for the benefits associated with it. Mathematical modeling can develop students' communication skills and the ability to demonstrate understanding through different representations. With the increased attention on mathematical modeling, there is a need for more curricula to be…

This mixed methods study examined how engagement in robotics and game design influenced students' self-efficacy, STEM attitudes, and computational thinking (CT) skills. Predominantly African-American students engaged in engineering and computer science tasks during informal learning environments. Results revealed students' self-efficacy scores on…

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…

In the past, computer programming was perceived as a task only carried out by computer scientists; in the 21st century, however, computer programming is viewed as a critical and necessary skill that everyone should learn. In order to improve teaching of problem-solving abilities in a computing environment, extensive research is being done on…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the high school students' views on instructions based on Flipped Classroom Model (FC) and LEGO applications. The case study, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used within the scope of the study, the duration of which was 7 weeks. In order to choose the research group of the study,…

A mixed-methods approach is evaluated for exploring collaborative behaviour, acceptance and progress surrounding an interactive technology for learning computer programming. A review of literature reveals a compelling case for using mixed-methods approaches when evaluating technology-enhanced-learning environments. Here, ethnographic approaches…

In this paper, we present two studies examining how high school students learn to program in a mobile, social programming environment that we have developed and deployed ("IPRO"). IPRO is delivered, with an associated curriculum, as an iPod Touch app and is freely and publicly available. We find that the affordances of mobility and…

Teaching computer programming to novices is a difficult task due to the complex nature of the subject, as negative stereotypes are associated with programming and because introductory programming courses often fail to encourage student understanding. This Protocol outlines the plan that is to be followed in order to investigate the effectiveness…