Background and Context: We explore the potential for understanding the processes involved in students' programming based on studying their behaviour and dialogue with each other and "conversations" with their programs. Objective: Our aim is to explore how a perspective of inquiry can be used as a point of departure for insights into how…

Background and context: Emotions are ubiquitous in academic settings and affect learning strategies, motivation to persevere, and academic outcomes, however they have not figured prominently in research on learning to program at the university level. Objective: To summarize the current knowledge available on the effect of emotions on students…

Debugging is an over-looked component in K-12 computational thinking education. Few K-12 programming environments are designed to teach debugging, and most debugging research were conducted on college-aged students. In this paper, we presented debugging exercises to 6th-8th grade students and analyzed their problem solving behaviors in a…

In Java, "System.out.printf" and "String.format" consume a specialised kind of string commonly known as a format string. In our study of first-year students at the Ateneo de Manila University, we discovered that format strings present a substantial challenge for novice programmers. Focusing on their first laboratory we found…

This article presents an investigation into the usage of shareable feedback tags as a way of delivering feedback to three different cohorts of programming students. A series of research questions are examined; these include investigating any perceived benefit from students using feedback tags and exploring how students interact with their…

Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; the process that leads to a student's first executable program is not well understood. At the University of Kent we have begun to explore the "compilation behaviours" of novice programmers, or the behaviours that students exhibit while authoring code; in our initial study, we have…