This study presents the development of a student-centric framework for utilizing virtual reality (VR) technologies in education, specifically focusing on enhancing computational thinking skills. While numerous frameworks exist in this domain, they often lack consideration of student preferences, which are integral for fostering learner autonomy.…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

Objectives: Automatic assessment systems are widely used to provide rapid feedback for students and reduce grading time. Despite the benefits of increased efficiency and improved pedagogical outcomes, an ongoing challenge is mitigating poor student behaviors when interacting with automatic assessment systems including numerous submissions,…

Low performance of nontechnical engineering students in programming courses is a problem that remains unsolved. Over the years, many authors have tried to identify the multiple causes for that failure, but there is unanimity on the fact that motivation is a key factor for the acquisition of knowledge by students. To better understand motivation, a…

Programming skills are an increasingly desirable asset across disciplines; however, learning to program continues to be difficult for many students. To improve pedagogy, we need to better understand the concepts that students find difficult and which have the biggest impact on their learning. Threshold-concept theory provides a potential lens on…

Learning to program, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, is a difficult undertaking for many students. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting with different introductory…

Modern web application development provides an attractive application area for introductory software engineering education, as students have direct experience with the domain and it provides them with the potential to gain practical, real-world skills. Achieving this potential requires the development of competency with a multiple component tech…

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead…

Literature on global employability signifies "enabling" learning environments where students encounter ill-formed and open-ended problems and are required to adapt and be creative. Varying forms of "projects," co-located and distributed, have populated computing curricula for decades and are generally deemed an answer to this…

This article presents two case studies aimed at exploring the use of self-explanations in the context of computational science and engineering (CSE) education. The self-explanations were elicited as students' in-code comments of a set of worked-examples, and the cases involved two different approaches to CSE education: glass box and black box. The…

Computer Science 1 (CS1), the first course taken by college-level computer science (CS) majors, has traditionally suffered from high failure rates. Efforts to understand this phenomenon have considered a wide range of predictors of CS success, such as prior programming experience, math ability, learning style, and gender, with findings that are…

The computing education research literature contains a wide variety of methods that can be used to identify students who are either at risk of failing their studies or who could benefit from additional challenges. Many of these are based on machine-learning models that learn to make predictions based on previously observed data. However, in…

The number of computer science (CS) courses has been dramatically expanding in U.S. high schools (HS). In comparison with well-established courses in mathematics and science, little is known about how the decisions made by HS CS teachers regarding how and what to teach impact student performance later in introductory college CS courses. Drawing on…

This study analyzes the impact of adding a review exercises module to an online tool used in a software engineering degree program. The objective of the module is to promote students' self-learning effort to improve their performance. We also intend to determine if this new feature has any effect on the amount of code copies detected in lab…

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment--flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students' amount of…