This dissertation presents the results and outcomes of an effort to design educational tools and curriculum to improve student learning in introductory programming courses. The work was conducted at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), situated in the Central Valley of California, and home to a diverse student population. The findings…

Increasing pressure to transform teaching and learning of engineering is supported by mounting research evidence for the value of learner-centered pedagogies. Despite this evidence, engineering faculty are often unsuccessful in applying such teaching approaches often because they lack the necessary knowledge to customize these pedagogies for their…

Teaching computer programming to freshmen students in Computer Sciences and other Information Technology areas has been identified as a complex activity. Different approaches have been studied looking for the best one that could help to improve this teaching process. A proposed approach was implemented which is based in the language immersion…