Understanding the architecture of a processor can be uninteresting and deterring for computer science students, since low-level details of computer architecture are often perceived to lack real-world impact. These courses typically have a strong practical component where students learn the fundamentals of the computer architecture and the handling…

This study compares computational thinking skills evidenced by two groups of students in two different secondary schools: one group per school was studying a qualification in Computer Science. The aim was to establish which elements of computational thinking were more prevalent in students studying Computer Science to a higher level. This in turn…

Computational thinking (CT) has been introduced in primary schools worldwide. However, rich classroom-based evidence and research on how to assess and support students' CT through programming are particularly scarce. This empirical study investigates 4th grade students' (N = 57) CT in a comparatively comprehensive and fine-grained manner by…

This study aims to provide a comprehensive and in-depth investigation of the debugging process in programming teaching in terms of cognitive and metacognitive aspects, based on programming students who demonstrate low, medium, and high programming performance and to propose instructional strategies for scaffolding novice learners in an effective…

Learning programming has become more and more popular and organizing introductory massive open online courses (MOOCs) on programming can be one way to bring this education to the masses. While programming MOOCs usually use automated assessment to give feedback on the submitted code, the lack of understanding of certain aspects of the tasks and…

Programming is a complex learning activity that involves coordination of cognitive processes and affective states. These aspects are often considered individually in computing education research, demonstrating limited understanding of how and when students learn best. This issue confines researchers to contextualize evidence-driven outcomes when…

In Robotics Education (RE), the hands-on experience with troubleshooting problems is seen as a good catalyst to enhance the participants' problem-solving skills. Based on the pedagogical technique of collaborative learning and pair programming, pair learning is an emerging and potential method in RE, which means that students collaborate in pairs…

Background and Context: Encouraging undergraduate programming students to think more about their software development processes is challenging. Most programming courses focus on coding skill development and mastering programming language features; subsequently software development processes (e.g. planning, code commenting, and error debugging) are…

This study explores students' cognitive processes while debugging programs by using an eye tracker. Students' eye movements during debugging were recorded by an eye tracker to investigate whether and how high- and low-performance students act differently during debugging. Thirty-eight computer science undergraduates were asked to debug two C…

Virtualization technology has been around for many years, and its use is increasingly becoming common in education, in general and in computing fields, in particular. This can be attributed partly to its potential to reduce costs, boost efficiency and overcome limited resources through its virtual applications such as servers, storage devices and…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

This article reports on an experiment undertaken in order to evaluate the effect of a program visualization tool for helping students to better understand the dynamics of object-oriented programs. The concrete tool used was BlueJ's debugger and object inspector. The study was done as a control-group experiment in an introductory programming…

We studied students' conceptions of correctness and their influence on students' correctness-related practices by examining how 159 students had analyzed the correctness of error-free and erroneous algorithms and by interviewing seven students regarding their work. We found that students conceptualized program correctness as the sum of the…

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java…

Anecdotal and research evidences show that the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) development model has produced a paradigm shift in the way we develop, support, and distribute software. This shift is not only redefining the software industry but also the way we teach and learn in our software engineering (SE) courses. But for many universities…