Digital technology offers new possibilities for children to play, express themselves, learn, and communicate. A recent development in online practice is a shift toward youth engaged in computer programming online communities. Programming is argued to be the new literacy of the millennium. In this article, I examine the use of Scratch, an online…

Computational thinking is a component of the Science and Engineering Practices in the Next Generation Science Standards, which were adopted by some states. We describe the activities in a high school chemistry course that may develop students' computational thinking skills by primarily using Excel, a widely available spreadsheet software. These…

Perspectives of students on what constitutes source-code plagiarism may differ based on their educational background. Surveys have been conducted with home students undertaking computing and joint computing subject degrees at higher education institutions throughout the UK, China, and South Cyprus, and a total of 984 responses have been…

In this article, I describe a series of Five Core Competencies that gifted education specialists should consider integrating into their teaching to respond to the many changes that are taking place in technology, work, and career preparation. Although the focus of this theory is on high- level jobs usually pursued by college graduates and advanced…

Agile methods and approaches such as eXtreme programming (XP) have become the norm for successful organizations not only in the software industry but also for businesses seeking to improve internal software processes. Pair programming in some form is touted as a major functionality and productivity improvement. However, numerous studies show that…

Learning to code has been an increasingly frequent topic of conversation both in academic circles and popular media. Learning to code recently received renewed attention with the announcement of the White House's Computer Science for All initiative (Smith 2016). This initiative intends "to empower all American students from kindergarten…

Purpose: This paper aims to argue that the process of making an original game develops digital literacy skills and provides an authentic learning experience as students create, publish and deploy interactive games. Teaching students to create computer games has become common in both K-12 and tertiary education to introducing programming concepts,…

Despite the growing popularity of teaching children to program games, little is known about the benefits for learning. In this article, the authors propose that game mechanics can be used as a window into how the children are thinking and describe a strategy for using them to analyze students' games. The study involved sixty 10-14 year old…

This article explores the suitability of static analysis techniques based on the abstract syntax tree (AST) for the automated assessment of early/mid degree level programming. Focus is on fairness, timeliness and consistency of grades and feedback. Following investigation into manual marking practises, including a survey of markers, the assessment…

Computer programming skills are important to many current careers; teaching robot coding to elementary students can start a positive foundation for technological careers, develop problem-solving skills, and growth mindsets. This study, through a repeated measures design involving students in two classrooms at two widely-separated grade levels…

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…

This paper is a report on the findings of research and development into the instructional model 'enhancing Thai Generation Z' creative thinking with Scratch through the spiral mode. The purposes of this study are: 1) to develop; 2) to evaluate and gain experts' opinion on the proposed model, adapted from a creative thinking spiral first used in…

This article is based on the experiences of two statistics professors who have taught students to write and effectively utilize code-based software in a college-level introductory statistics course. Advantages of using software and code-based software in this context are discussed. Suggestions are made on how to ease students into using code with…

The purpose of this study is to explore students' understanding of loops and nested loops concepts. Sixty-three mechanical engineering students attending an introductory programming course participated in the study. APOS (Action, Process, Object, Schema) is a constructivist theory developed originally for mathematics education. This study is the…

Sprego is programming with spreadsheet functions. The present paper provides introductory Sprego examples which have so far only been available in Hungarian. Spreadsheet environments offer both a programming tool which best serves beginner and end-user programmers' interest, and an approach which lightens the burden of coding and language details.…