Background: Integrating programming in K-12 curriculum has become a global consensus. Teachers are central figures in programming instruction. But the majority of current research focuses on teachers' external teaching behaviours and less on teachers' attitudes towards programming. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to validate the K-12…

Background: A resurgence in teaching coding in primary school classrooms has led to a pedagogical swing towards using physical computing and coding to develop students' use of algorithms, computational thinking, and problem-solving skills. Two obstacles impede the optimal development of these objectives: the availability of a suitable pedagogy and…

Over the past decade, the call to foster computational thinking (CT) in every child has received considerable attention. However, there is little understanding of whether children are developmentally ready to think computationally and what specific CT concepts and skills can be developed at various ages. This study explored the developmental and…

Background: Project-based collaborative learning (PBCL) is a technique that supports knowledge and skill development through complex, real-world projects. Understanding factors that influence group performance in PBCL, such as gender composition, is crucial. Objectives: This study investigates the impact of gender composition on group performance…

Background: Implementing maker education in schools is on the rise, fuelled by its potential to move formal education towards a creative, technology-driven 21st century learning culture. In maker education, collaborative learning takes place through and around various digital and traditional technologies, which provide the means for students'…

Threshold concepts have been characterised in the literature as jewels in the curriculum as they can inform teaching and learning practices. Therefore, identifying and addressing threshold concepts in any discipline is critical. The aim of the current study is to explore the existence of threshold concepts in computer programming and specifically…

The study designed WebQuest activities and explored the learning performance of learners to understand the suitability of using WebQuest in a college programming course. The study modified the processes of WebQuest based on social constructivism and scaffolding learning, and included programming tasks such as debugging practice to encourage…

Background: Learning to code is increasingly embedded in secondary and higher education curricula, where solving programming exercises plays an important role in the learning process and in formative and summative assessment. Unfortunately, students admit that copying code from each other is a common practice and teachers indicate they rarely use…

Promoting the cultivation of computational thinking (CT) skills in programming activities has become a key issue in the K-12 curriculum, however, there is no unified conclusion on how to design programming activities to promote the acquisition of CT skills more effectively. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of using…

Background: Students experience higher-order thinking skills by finding ways to solve the problem, debugging errors while applying the solution, and testing the solution in programming. However, the inability to create schemas that will characterise programming structures is one of the difficulties during this process. Objectives: This study aimed…

Background: Problem-solving is a multidimensional and dynamic process that requires and interlinks cognitive, metacognitive, and affective dimensions of learning. However, current approaches practiced in computing education research (CER) are not sufficient to capture information beyond the basic programming process data (i.e., IDE-log data).…

Background: Owing to the exponential growth of three-dimensional (3D) environments amongst researchers and educators to create simulation games (SGs) in primary education, there is a growing interest to examine their potential support in computer science courses instead of visual programming environments. Objectives: This study explores the…

Massive open online course (MOOC) studies have shown that precourse skills (such as precomputational thinking) and course engagement measures (such as making multiple submission attempts with assignments when the initial submission is incorrect) predict students' grade performance, yet little is known about whether these factors predict students'…

This study compares the effects of object-oriented and robot programming activities on programming achievement, abstraction, problem solving, and motivation. In the study, two consecutive experimental cases were conducted to examine the consistency of findings. The research sample comprises 81 tenth-grade students undergoing vocational secondary…

In the last few years, programming, computational thinking, and robotics are more frequently integrated into elementary education. This integration can be done in many different ways. However, it is still unclear which teaching methods work in which situations. To provide some clarity in this area, we compared two methods of integrating…