Background and Context: Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, such tools do not identify plagiarism, nor suggest what assignment submissions are suspicious of plagiarism. Source code plagiarism…

Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, most of these tools only measure the similarity between assignment submissions, and do not actually identify which are suspicious of plagiarism. This work…

Automatically detecting bugs in student program code is critical to enable formative feedback to help students pinpoint errors and resolve them. Deep learning models especially code2vec and ASTNN have shown great success for "large-scale" code classification. It is not clear, however, whether they can be effectively used for bug…

An organization's infrastructure rests upon the premise that cybersecurity professionals have specific knowledge in administrating and protecting it against outside threats. Without this expertise, sensitive information could be leaked to malicious actors and cause damage to critical systems. In order to facilitate this process, the presented work…

We present a privacy-friendly early-detection framework to identify students at risk of failing in introductory programming courses at university. The framework was validated for two different courses with annual editions taken by higher education students (N = 2 080) and was found to be highly accurate and robust against variation in course…

Like much of the world, the United States is rapidly implementing the teaching of computer science into both primary and secondary school curricula. Uncovering what challenges U.S. schools in general--and rural U.S. schools in the unique environment of more mountainous regions of the U.S. in particular--face in implementing new curricula is not…

Background: Learning to code is increasingly embedded in secondary and higher education curricula, where solving programming exercises plays an important role in the learning process and in formative and summative assessment. Unfortunately, students admit that copying code from each other is a common practice and teachers indicate they rarely use…

Software vulnerabilities have become a severe cybersecurity issue. There are numerous resources of industry best practices available, but it is still challenging to effectively teach secure coding practices. The resources are not designed for classroom usage because the amount of information is overwhelming for students. There are efforts in…

In this research, a mixed-method approach was employed to conduct large-scale eye-tracking measurements, traditionally associated with high costs and extensive time commitments. Utilizing consumer-grade webcams in conjunction with open-source software, data was collected from an expansive cohort of students, thereby demonstrating the scalability…

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…

Cheating has been a long-standing issue in university assessments. However, the release of ChatGPT and other free-to-use generative AI tools has provided a new and distinct method for cheating. Students can run many assessment questions through the tool and generate a superficially compelling answer, which may or may not be accurate. We ran a…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pre-enrollment attributes of first-year students at Computer Science BSc programs of the University of Miskolc, Hungary in order to find those that mostly contribute to failure on the Programming Basics first-semester course and, consequently to dropout. Our aim is to detect at-risk students early,…

Background/Context: Computer programming is rarely accessible to K-12 students, especially for those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Middle school age is a transitioning time when adolescents are more likely to make long-term decisions regarding their academic choices and interests. Having access to productive and positive…

This article explores issues of student identity and identification through a third-space theory lens. In addition, it positions this use of third-space theory as contributory to Students-as-Partners (SaP) approaches to teaching and learning. Naturally, this research was constructed as a SaP project, and research was undertaken as a collaboration…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…