Teaching and learning programming, and especially Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), is a complicated and challenging task. Students have to comprehend various OOP concepts and utilize them for designing object-oriented programs. Various types of educational programming environments, such as microworlds and educational games, have been devised for…

With the progress and innovation of digital technology, people's knowledge acquisition, information exchange, and communication modes have changed significantly. The universality of emerging technology media enables instructional designers to use digital media to provide different teaching materials and teaching methods to meet the needs of…

Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

Recognition of students' facial expressions can be used to understand their level of attention. In a traditional classroom setting, teachers guide the classes and continuously monitor and engage the students to evaluate their understanding and progress. Given the current popularity of e-learning environments, it has become important to assess the…

Technology skills instruction is an important component of educational technology courses, which has been shown to raise pre-service teachers' computer self-efficacy. Computer self-efficacy, in turn, is positively related to their self-efficacy for technology integration. Studies of undergraduate technology skills instruction found that classroom…

A study of 148 male and 161 female 7-12 graders tested the hypothesis that computer attitudes and computer confidence positively affect each other and that both positively affect commitment to computer learning. Contrary to expectations, computer confidence had a negative effect on commitment to learning. Includes an attitudes and self-confidence…

A study of 115 female and 87 male college students in an introductory computer science course surveyed student attitudes in relation to gender, experience, and parental encouragement and determined that females were less interested in computers and less confident than males and that males were more experienced. After the one semester course,…

Examines male and female high school students' attitudes toward computers in relation to gender and computer experience. Findings revealed: males showed a more positive attitude toward computers even when computer experience was controlled; females were less interested in computer science (CS) than males, however no gender differences were found…

Tests the effects of Web page design instruction on improving computer self-efficacy of preservice teachers. Various computer experiences, including weekly computer use, weekly Internet use, and use frequencies of word processing, e-mail, games, and presentation software were significantly related to computer self-efficacy. Use frequencies of word…