Over the past years, higher education institutions have been exploring different mechanisms to adapt their learning and teaching practices to increase students' engagement. One of the proposals has been to reuse Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) as Small Online Private Courses (SPOCs), or as complementary resources in traditional courses through…

With the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, and other emerging information technologies, an increasing number of students without computer science (CS) backgrounds have begun to learn programming. Programming is considered a complex task for beginners, and instructors find it difficult to quickly address all the problems that students…

Programing is difficult for beginners because they need to learn the new language of computers. Developing software, especially complex software, is bound to result in problems, frustration, and the need to think in new ways. Identifying the learning behavior behind programing by way of empirical studies can help beginners learn more easily. In…