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…

Background and Context: Peer code review activities provide well-documented benefits to students in programming courses. Students develop relevant skills through exposure to alternative coding solutions, producing and receiving feedback, and collaboration with peers. Despite these benefits, low student motivation has been identified as one of the…

Background and Context: Flipped classrooms are becoming more widely adopted across engineering higher education contexts. In degree programs where enrollment is increasing and undergraduate curricula are packed with content, pedagogies that allow more time for actively participate in classroom activities are being highly sought after to aid in…

Background and Context: Positive youth programming development (PYPD) was conceptualized to measure various positive qualities of students in programming education. Objective: This study aimed to develop a valid PYPD instrument in the pilot before exploring students' positive qualities in two follow-up studies. Method: A multi-study design was…

Background and Context: In spite of the decades spent developing software visualization (SV), doubts still remain regarding their effectiveness. Furthermore, student engagement plays an important role in improving SV effectiveness as it is correlated with many positive academic outcomes. It has been shown that the existing SV has failed to engage…

This work investigates the effectiveness of simulated robots as tools to support the learning of programming. After the completion of a systematic review and exploratory research, a multi-case case study was undertaken. A simulator, named Kebot, was developed and used to run four 10-hour programming workshops. Twenty-three student participants…

A multimedia university programme with relatively equal numbers of male and female students in elective programming subjects provided a rare opportunity to investigate female motivation to study and pursue computer programming in a career. The MSLQ was used to survey 85 participants. In common with research into deterrence of females from STEM…

Programming education is a widely researched and intensely discussed topic. The literature proposes a broad variety of pedagogical viewpoints, practical approaches, learning theories, motivational vehicles, and other elements of the learning situation. However, little effort has been put on understanding cultural and contextual differences in…

The majority of computer science education research to date has focused on purely cognitive student outcomes. Understanding the "motivational" states experienced by students may enhance our understanding of the computer science learning process, and may reveal important instructional interventions that could benefit student engagement and…