The provision of all-female computer science outreach programmes is a common strategy used to foster greater interest in the subject for high school aged girls. Based on key factors that affect girls' interest in computer science (CS), outreach programmes often share much in their approach. Nonetheless, there is criticism from a research…

It is widely believed that there are educational benefits to making computer games, but there is no systematic review of research on this topic. This article describes a meta-synthesis of research on children designing and programming computer games that investigates the extent to which there is evidence of benefits for computer science learning…

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).…

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…

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…

Systematic endeavors to take computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) to scale in middle and high school classrooms are underway with curricula that emphasize the enactment of authentic CT skills, especially in the context of programming in block-based programming environments. There is, therefore, a growing need to measure students'…

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…

This article proposes and explores the kinds of computational thinking, creative practices, design activities, and inclusive learning opportunities provided to diverse high school youth when designing integrated systems through simultaneously physically and digitally responsive wearable games and systems. Previous work in this area, conducted by…

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…

Context: Programming courses are compulsory for most engineering degrees, but students' performance on these courses is often not as good as expected. Programming is difficult for students to learn, given that it includes a lot of new, complex, and abstract topics. All of this has led experts to the conclusion that new teaching techniques are…

Recursion is one of the most important and hardest topics in lower division computer science courses. As it is an advanced programming skill, the best way to learn it is through targeted practice exercises. But the best practice problems are time consuming to manually grade by an instructor. As a consequence, students historically have completed…

While demand for computer science and information technology skills grows, the proportion of women entering computer science (CS) fields has declined. One critical juncture is the transition from high school to college. In our study, we examined factors predicting college persistence in computer science- and technology-related majors from data…

We performed a controlled experiment comparing a C and a Python Introductory Programming course. Three faculty members at University of Campinas, Brazil, taught the same CS1 course for the same majors in two different semesters, one version in Python and one in C, with a total of 391 students involved in the experiment. We measured the dropout…

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…