Purpose: The presented study was conducted to unpack high school students' motivational influences in engineering/computer science project-based learning (PjBL), using the attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction (ARCS) model of motivation as a conceptual framework. Methods: A qualitative research approach was used with student focus…

Contribution: This article applies science capital research to computing education in order to understand why students engage with a programme involving computing, and what they aspire to get out of their education. Background: Capital is a concept which has been used in educational research to study inequality, aspiration and achievement.…

Background: Engineering curricula often consist of separate courses that do not form a cohesive learning experience. Researchers revised an undergraduate computer engineering curriculum at an urban university, seeking to improve motivation and achievement in an important population that is traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields.…

Contribution: This article presents a research for enhancing the computer science students' perception on the software project management subject. The main objective of this article is double. The first one is to redesign the current course by including new teaching and new learning methods that encourage students to learn the project management…

Contribution: This study indicates that supporting debugging processes is a strong method to improve debugging outcome quality among preservice, early childhood education (ECE) teachers. Background: Central to preparing ECE teachers to teach computer science is helping them learn to debug. Little is known about how ECE teachers' motivation and…

Contribution: A successful activity based on the scavenger hunt (SH) game is presented here. Although "serious game" in education now seems synonymous with videogame, the effectiveness of hands-on traditional games to increase student performance that, besides, they also like is defended and proved. The proposal is not focused, as is…

Contribution: This article presents a synthesis of the findings and implications from the IC2Think program of research in undergraduate computer science (CS) courses examining student motivation and self-regulated learning (SRL). These studies illuminate both the difficulty and potential for motivating CS students, as well as the uniqueness of CS…

Contribution: This article adds to the results of previous systematic mapping study by addressing a more ample context of problem-based learning (PBL) in computing education. Background: PBL is defined as an instructional method of constructivist teaching that uses real problems as a motivating element for learning. Although PBL was born in…

Contribution: This article provides evidence on the effectiveness of game-based learning (GBL) for computer science education when using educational video games created by teachers using authoring tools. Background: Although teacher-oriented authoring tools for creating educational video games can help overcome the main barriers hampering the use…

Contribution: This article presents an experience report on the application of flipped classroom (FC) to the laboratory sessions (henceforth lab sessions) of an undergraduate computer science course. Background: Hands-on work in computer science lab sessions is typically preceded by technical instructions on how to install, configure, and use the…

Contribution: This paper describes a highly flexible design for a master's-level server administration course that uses updated technologies, addresses the most important course design challenges and extracts useful feedback from student work. The main contribution of this design is eliminating the self-regulation challenge students encounter in…

Contribution: A model of tiered in-lab, compulsory lab programming sessions suitable for use in flipped learning environments. This article also addresses the scarcity of research that explores the effects of in-class activity organization. Background: When facing a subject they perceive as dry or difficult, some students may feel discouraged from…

An increase in student motivation is often cited as an expected effect of software visualization, but, as far as the authors are aware, no controlled experiments have yet demonstrated this. This paper therefore presents a controlled evaluation of this effect, conducted within the framework of self-determination theory. Students were tasked with…

The ideal of self-paced learning, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago by Keller in his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), has not yet been widely adopted. In spite of its perceived promise of helping students to learn at the speed aligned to their individual backgrounds, motivation, and skills, PSI has been challenging to implement.…

Computational thinking and creative thinking are valuable tools both within and outside of computer science (CS). The goal of the project discussed here is to increase students' achievement in CS courses through a series of computational creativity exercises (CCEs). In this paper, the framework of CCEs is described, and the results of two separate…