Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming…

This article presents the design and development of i*CATch, a construction kit for physical and wearable computing that was designed to be scalable, plug-and-play, and to provide support for iterative and exploratory learning. It consists of a standardized construction interface that can be adapted for a wide range of soft textiles or electronic…

Programming is recognized as one of seven grand challenges in computing education. Decades of research have shown that the major problems novices experience are composition-based---they may know what the individual programming language constructs are, but they do not know how to put them together. Despite this fact, textbooks, educational…

This article distills a discussion about the goals, mechanisms, and effects of three environments which aim to support the acquisition and development of computing concepts (problem solving and programming) in pre-University and non-technical students: Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch. The conversation started in a special session on the topic at the…

Example programs play an important role in the teaching and learning of programming. Students as well as teachers rank examples as the most important resources for learning to program. Example programs work as role models and must therefore always be consistent with the principles and rules we are teaching. However, it is difficult to find or…

For many years computing in New Zealand schools was focused on teaching students how to use computers, and there was little opportunity for students to learn about programming and computer science as formal subjects. In this article we review a series of initiatives that occurred from 2007 to 2009 that led to programming and computer science being…

Identifying the set of cognitive processes (CPs) a student can go through during computer programming is an interesting research problem. It can provide a better understanding of the human aspects in computer programming process and can also contribute to the computer programming education in general. The study identified the presence of a set of…

A concept inventory is a standardized assessment tool intended to evaluate a student's understanding of the core concepts of a topic. In order to create a concept inventory it is necessary to accurately identify these core concepts. A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We…

There is an active research community concentrating on visualizations of algorithms taught in CS1 and CS2 courses. These visualizations can help students to create concrete visual images of the algorithms and their underlying concepts. Not only "fundamental algorithms" can be visualized, but also algorithms used in compilers. Visualizations that…

This article describes the construction process and evaluation of the Agile Constructionist Mentoring Methodology (ACMM), a mentoring method for guiding software development projects in the high school. The need for such a methodology has arisen due to the complexity of mentoring software project development in the high school. We introduce the…

Reconfigurable computing is an established field in computer science. Teaching this field to computer science students demands special attention due to limited student experience in electronics and digital system design. This article presents a compact course on reconfigurable processors, which was offered at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt,…

We present the results of an interview study investigating student experiences in two online introductory computer science courses. Our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection of two research traditions: "distance and adult education research," which tends to be sociologically oriented, and "computer science education…

Previous studies indicate that the use of pair programming has beneficial effects on student learning. In this article, we present a controlled study that directly measured students' acquisition of individual programming skills using laboratory practice (in which students programmed individually under exam conditions). Additionally, we analyzed…

Our approach to teaching introductory artificial intelligence (AI) unifies its diverse core topics through a theme of machine learning, and emphasizes how AI relates more broadly with computer science. Our work, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, involves the development, implementation, and testing of a suite of projects that…

Information technology teams are often partially distributed teams (PDTs). A PDT consists of two or more subteams that are separated geographically. This article describes research focused on the use of PDTs to engage students in "real world" IT team learning about the subject matter while also teaching them the skills they will need to work in…