High attrition and dropout rates are common in introductory programming courses. One of the reasons students drop out is loss of motivation due to the lack of feedback and proper assessment of their progress. Hence, a process-oriented approach is needed in assessing programming progress, which entails examining and measuring students' compilation…

"Integrating Computer Science Across the Core" is a guide to systematizing computer science and computational thinking practices in your school. While most books explain how to teach computer science as a stand-alone discipline, this innovative approach will help you leverage your existing curriculum to deepen and expand students'…

Introductory programming courses typically focus on building generalizable programming knowledge by focusing on a language's syntax and semantics. Assignments often involve "code tracing" problems, where students perform close tracking of code's execution, typically in the context of 'toy' problems. "Reading-first" approaches…

Reintroducing computer science (CS) education in K-12 schools to promote computational thinking (CT) has attracted significant attention among scholars and educators. Among the several essential components included in CS and CT education, program debugging is an indispensable skill. However, debugging teaching has often been overlooked in K-12…

Integrating computational thinking (CT) into STEM disciplines requires secondary teachers to develop their pedagogical content knowledge of computing and content integration. Experienced teachers who choose to integrate CT in their secondary STEM courses may struggle in the same ways as novice teachers as they learn about programming and its…

The lack of participation of girls in programming robotics is well documented in the international literature on the subject. The Inspired Towards Science, Engineering and Technology (I-SET) is a community engagement project that promotes science engagement in predominantly disadvantaged communities. In this paper, we present the findings of an…

Achieving learner engagement in the teaching and learning process is paramount towards ensuring knowledge retention in QBASIC programming. This study focuses on effects of b-learning and face-to-face (F2F) on college students' engagement and retention in QBASIC programming. The study adopted quasi-experimental design with non-equivalent group…

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…

College-educated women in the workforce are discovering a latent interest in and aptitude for computing motivated by the prevalence of computing as an integral part of jobs in many fields as well as continued headlines about the number of unfilled, highly paid computing jobs. One of these women's choices for retraining are the so-called coding…

Computational thinking (CT) is being recognized as a critical component of student success in the digital era. Many contend that integrating CT into core curricula is the surest method for providing all students with access to CT. However, the CT community lacks an agreed-upon conceptualization of CT that would facilitate this integration, and…

There is limited research on teaching and learning of programming in primary school and even less about aspects concerning teaching programming from teachers' viewpoint. In this study, we explore how Finnish 1-6 primary school teachers (N=91), teaching at schools with Swedish as the language of instruction, relate to programming and teaching of…

Despite the value that cultural experts bring to efforts to broaden the participation of racially minoritized youth in US computer science, there has been little research on supporting their knowledge of computing. This is a missed opportunity to explore the diffusion of computing knowledge across local community contexts where underrepresented…

The study was carried out from 2018 to 2020 with the challenge - how to assess the level of computational thinking. The research design is mixed since the disclosure of mutual influence of the components of the chain 'learning programming -- computational thinking -- evaluating computational thinking' requires the use of both qualitative and…

Educational data mining involves the application of data mining techniques to student activity. However, in the context of computer programming, many data mining techniques can not be applied because they require vector-shaped input, whereas computer programs have the form of syntax trees. In this paper, we present ast2vec, a neural network that…

This study aimed to introduce unplugged algorithm activities developed for preschool children and to examine their implementation process. The activities used in the study were designed to support preschool children to develop and apply different solutions to problem situations that require algorithmic thinking and to learn basic algorithm…