Online learning has been widely discussed in education research, and open educational resources have become an increasingly popular way to help learners acquire knowledge. However, these resources contain massive amounts of information, making it difficult for learners to identify Web articles that refer to computer science knowledge. This study…

In this article, we leverage ideas from the theory of coevolutionary computation to analyze interactions of students with problems. We introduce the idea of "informatively" easy or hard concepts. Our approach is different from more traditional analyses of problem difficulty such as item analysis in the sense that we consider Pareto…

Background: Coding has become an integral part of STEM education. However, novice learners face difficulties in processing codes within embedded structures (also termed nested structures). This study aimed to investigate the cognitive mechanism underlying the processing of embedded coding structures based on hierarchical complexity theory, which…

Prior research has demonstrated the advantages of applying mobile game-based learning (MGBL) applications to supporting students' learning. However, studies that specifically examine the effects of game quality and different types of cognitive loads on learning effectiveness in MGBL contexts are scarce. Therefore, this study aims to address this…

Flipped classroom is one of the important teaching modes among many novel teaching methods in recent years, students watch the video in the pre-class. However, if students cannot focus on the pre-class video learning or have problems with the learning content, the learning effect will be less than expected. Therefore, this research proposes a…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners' computational thinking. Design/methodology/approach: By…

As computational thinking becomes increasingly essential, the challenge of designing effective teaching approaches to foster students' abilities in this area persists, especially for higher order thinking skills. This study addresses this challenge by proposing and implementing a peer assessment-based Scrum project (PA-SP) learning approach in…

Automatically identifying struggling students learning to program can assist teachers in providing timely and focused help. This work presents a new deep-learning language model for predicting "bug-fix-time", the expected duration between when a software bug occurs and the time it will be fixed by the student. Such information can guide…

Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…

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).…

Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and…

Background: The motivational climate within a course has been shown to be an important predictor of students' engagement and course ratings. Because little is known about how students' perceptions of the motivational climate in a computer science (CS) course vary by sex, race/ethnicity, and academic major, we investigated these questions: (1) To…

There are many paradigms available to address the unique and complex problems introduced with parallel programming. These complexities have implications for computer science education as ubiquitous multi-core computers drive the need for programmers to understand parallelism. One major obstacle to student learning of parallel programming is that…

Aim/Purpose: Multi-threaded software design is considered to be difficult, especially to novice programmers. In this study, we explored how students cope with a task that its solution requires a multi-threaded architecture to achieve optimal runtime. Background: An efficient exploit of multicore processors architecture requires computer programs…

Contribution: The design of an operating system (OS) experiment course with a gentle learning curve is proposed and a scalable OS experiment platform supporting learning behavior analysis is presented. Background: In the teaching practice of the OS experiment course, several problems were faced. First, the learning curve for the students is too…