This study analyzes the impact of adding a review exercises module to an online tool used in a software engineering degree program. The objective of the module is to promote students' self-learning effort to improve their performance. We also intend to determine if this new feature has any effect on the amount of code copies detected in lab…

Teaching is the process of conveying knowledge and skills to learners. It involves preventing misunderstandings or correcting misconceptions that learners have acquired. Thus, effective teaching relies on solid knowledge of the discipline, but also a good grasp of where learners are likely to trip up or misunderstand. In programming, there is much…

Perspectives of students on what constitutes source-code plagiarism may differ based on their educational background. Surveys have been conducted with home students undertaking computing and joint computing subject degrees at higher education institutions throughout the UK, China, and South Cyprus, and a total of 984 responses have been…

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…

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…

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has often been seen as an all-or-nothing approach, difficult to apply in traditional curricula based on traditional lectured courses with exercise and lab sessions. Aalborg University has since its creation in 1974 practiced PBL in all subjects, including computer science and software engineering, following a model…

In this article, we discuss the possible connection between the programming language and the paradigm behind it, and programmers' tendency to adopt an external or internal perspective of the system they develop. Based on a qualitative analysis, we found that when working with the visual, interobject language of live sequence charts (LSC),…

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming…

POGIL has been successfully implemented in a scientific computing course to teach science students how to program in Python. Following POGIL guidelines, the authors have developed guided inquiry activities that lead student teams to discover and understand programming concepts. With each iteration of the scientific computing course, the authors…

Many people are first exposed to code through web development, yet little is known about the barriers beginners face in these formative experiences. In this article, we describe a study of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory web development course taken by both computing majors and general education students. Using data collected…

This article presents EarSketch, a learning environment that combines computer programming with sample-based music production to create a computational remixing environment for learning introductory computing concepts. EarSketch has been employed in both formal and informal settings, yielding significant positive results in student content…

Cooperative learning is a well-known instructional technique that has been applied with a wide variety of subject matter and a broad spectrum of populations. This article briefly reviews the principles of cooperative learning, and describes how these principles were incorporated into a comprehensive set of cooperative learning activities for a CS1…

Greenfoot is an educational integrated development environment aimed at learning and teaching programming. It is aimed at a target audience of students from about 14 years old upwards, and is also suitable for college- and university-level education. Greenfoot combines graphical, interactive output with programming in Java, a standard, text-based…

Scratch is a visual programming environment that allows users (primarily ages 8 to 16) to learn computer programming while working on personally meaningful projects such as animated stories and games. A key design goal of Scratch is to support self-directed learning through tinkering and collaboration with peers. This article explores how the…

This article reports on difficulties related to the concepts of inheritance and polymorphism, expressed by a group of 22 in-service CS teachers with an experience with the procedural paradigm, as they coped with a course on OOP. Our findings are based on the analysis of tests, questionnaires that the teachers completed in the course, as well as on…