As in other STEM disciplines, early computing courses tend to stress individual assignments and discourage collaboration. This can lead to negative learning experiences that compel some students to give up. According to social learning theory, one way to improve students' learning experiences is to help them form and participate actively in…

Computer Programming Learners usually fail to get approved in introductory courses because solving problems using computers is a complex task. The most important reason for that failure is concerned with motivation; motivation strongly impacts on the learning process. In this paper we discuss how techniques like program animation, and automatic…

Previous studies have proposed many indicators to assess the effect of student engagement in learning and academic achievement but have not yet been clearly articulated. In addition, while student engagement tracking systems have been designed, they rely on the log data but not on performance data. This paper presents results of a non-machine…

DEVS (Discrete Event System Specification) is a formalism that was introduced in the mid-1970s by Bernard Zeigler, for modeling and analysis of discrete event systems. DEVS is essentially a formal mathematical language for specifying complex systems through models that can be simulated and has been executed in object-oriented software, DEVSJava…

In the last few years, it has been pointed out that teaching programming is a strong strategy to develop pupils' competences in computational thinking (CT). In the Portuguese context, the curriculum changes in 2018 made programming and CT compulsory for every pupil in primary and secondary education. Nowadays, there is an information and…

In computer science education at school, computational thinking has been an emerging topic over the last decade. Even though, computational thinking is interpreted and integrated in classrooms in different ways, an identification process about what computational thinking is about has been in progress among computer science school-teachers and…

Although teachers need to assess computational thinking (CT) for computer science education in K-12, it is not easy for them to evaluate students' programs based on the perspective. The purpose of this study was to investigate students' CT skills reflected in their Scratch programs. The context of the study was a middle school coding club where…

In programming problem solving activities, sometimes, students need feedback to progress in the course, being positively affected by the received feedback. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art and practice of the feedback approaches on introductory programming. To this end, we have carried out a systematic literature mapping to…

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…

Computational thinking and programming have emerged as central 21st-century skills. Several countries have embedded these skills in their school curricula. This study investigates how an optional programming course affects eighth-grade mathematical problem solving in Norway using a quasi-experimental design with pre- and post-tests. These tests…

As computer-science-for-all initiatives continue to grow, many schools are looking for ways to introduce computer science skills and thinking to elementary-age children. Some initiatives have focused on coding as its own endeavor, not integrated with other subjects like mathematics, science, or literacy. Increasingly, developers and researchers…

Computational thinking is an important skill in computer science since the 1960s, and it is closely related to problem solving. Almost all research related to computational thinking mentions problem solving. Although some research has been conducted on computational thinking, few studies examined the impact of personal traits on students'…

The computer science industry and college degree programs for computer science throughout the country suffer from the "pipeline shrinkage problem", which describes the declining number of qualified people in various industries (Kordaki & Berdousis, 2014). For computer science, the specific population decline relates to a shortage of…

Online courses on different platforms provide thousands of students with the knowledge and skills they need. This paper presents the results of a survey of students, during which they expressed their opinion on the use of electronic resources in teaching. The survey showed that students are more motivated to study when they understand how their…

In this study, we developed a classification system of programming errors based on the historical data of 680,540 programming records collected on the Online Judge platform. The classification system described six types of programming errors (i.e., syntax, logical, type, writing, misunderstanding, and runtime errors) and their connections with…