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…

We conducted a systematic literature review on automated grading and feedback tools for programming education. We analysed 121 research papers from 2017 to 2021 inclusive and categorised them based on skills assessed, approach, language paradigm, degree of automation, and evaluation techniques. Most papers assess the correctness of assignments in…

Programming demands a variety of cognitive skills, and mastering these competencies is essential for success in computer science education. The importance of formative feedback is well acknowledged in programming education, and thus, a diverse range of techniques has been proposed to generate and enhance formative feedback for programming…

To help address programming plagiarism and collusion, students should be informed about acceptable practices and about program similarity, both coincidental and non-coincidental. However, current approaches are usually manual, brief, and delivered well before students are in a situation where they might commit academic misconduct. This article…

SQL compiler error messages are the primary way users receive feedback when they encounter syntax errors or other issues in their SQL queries. Effective error messages can enhance the user experience by providing clear, informative, and actionable feedback. Despite the age of SQL compilers, it still remains largely unclear what contributes to an…

Regular expressions (REs) are often taught to undergraduate computer science majors in the Formal Languages and Automata (FLA) course; they are widely used to implement different software functionalities such as search mechanisms and data validation in diverse fields. Despite their importance, the difficulty of REs has been asserted many times in…

Objectives: This study addresses the challenges faced by students repeating an introductory programming course (CS1) at an online university, where dropout and failure rates remain high. While programming education has been widely studied, targeted interventions for repeating students remain scarce. Our research aims to analyze the experiences of…

In many countries, computer programming is becoming an integral part of the secondary school curriculum. However, many teachers, especially in the first years of Flemish secondary school, have limited experience with teaching programming. To improve their knowledge about programming, many different types of professional development programs have…

Autograding systems are being increasingly deployed to meet the challenges of teaching programming at scale. Studies show that formative feedback can greatly help novices learn programming. This work extends an autograder, enabling it to provide formative feedback on programming assignment submissions. Our methodology starts with the design of a…

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For…

Assessment plays an important role in education and can both guide and motivate learning. Assessment can, however, be carried out with different aims: providing the students with feedback that supports the learning (formative assessment) and judging to which degree the students have fulfilled the intended learning outcomes (summative assessment).…

Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work, is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how…

Learning the first programming language is challenging for many students. High failure rates and bimodally distributed grades lead to a pedagogical interest in supporting students in first-year programming courses (CS1). In higher education, the important role of feedback for guiding the learning process and improving the learning outcome is…

This article proposes a VHDL language course that establishes a strong correlation between the language statements and their use in circuit synthesis. Two course modules are described: a basic module that contains the essential concepts of the language, sufficient for students to describe medium complexity circuits, followed by a second module…

At schools special learning and programming environments are often used in the field of algorithms. Particularly with regard to computer science lessons in secondary education, they are supposed to help novices to learn the basics of programming. In several parts of Germany (e.g., Bavaria) these fundamentals are taught as early as in the seventh…