This article reports the analysis of data from five different studies to identify predictors of preservice, early childhood teachers' views of (a) the nature of coding, (b) integration of coding into preschool classrooms, and (c) relation of coding to fields other than computer science (CS). Significant changes in views of coding were predicted by…

Computer science can be included in Early Childhood Education (ECE) through the use of block-based coding and robots. But this requires adequate preparation of ECE teachers to work with coding and robots, and integrate such into high quality lesson plans. In this paper, we investigate predictors of lesson plan quality among preservice, early…

The Digital Agenda for Europe (2015) states that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for Information and Communications Technology by 2020. This lack of IT professionals stems from the small number of students graduating in computer science. To retain more students in the field, teachers can use remote robotic experiments to explain difficult…

Contextualized learning is considered beneficial for student success. In this article, we assess the impact of context-based learning tools on student grade performance in an introductory computer science course. In particular, we investigate two central questions: (1) does the use context-based learning tools, robots and animations, affect…