Concurrency is often perceived as difficult by students. One reason for this may be due to the fact that abstractions used in concurrent programs leave more situations undefined compared to sequential programs (e.g., in what order statements are executed), which makes it harder to create a proper mental model of the execution environment. Students…

This paper introduces a teaching process to develop students' problem-solving and programming efficacy in an introductory computer programming course. The proposed teaching practice provides step-by-step guidelines on using worked-out examples of code to demonstrate the applications of programming concepts. These coding demonstrations explicitly…

One of the aspects of programming that novices often struggle with is the understanding of abstract concepts, such as variables, loops, expressions, and especially Boolean operations. This paper aims to explore the effects of programming tools with different degrees of embodiment on learning Boolean operations in elementary school. To this end, 67…

A wide range of benefits have been posited from participation in competitive programming contests. However, an analysis of participation in north American regional contests in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shows that participation in these contests is sharply declining, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover,…

We live in a digital age, not least accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is all the more important in our society that students learn and master the key competence of algorithmic thinking to understand the informatics concepts behind every digital phenomena and thus is able to actively shape the future. For this to be successful, concepts must…

In this case study, we present our findings regarding a massive open online Scratch programming course. The course, which followed a project-based learning approach, was delivered from July 4 to 30, 2022 to 186 students in Brazil. The students were challenged to develop individual coding projects. Our research goal was to investigate teaching and…

This study developed a physical computing game-design project that incorporates block-based programming, physical computing, and computer game design for Taiwan's high school technology education curriculum to strengthen students' computational thinking. The project asked students to develop a somatosensory computer game using a block-based…

During the past two decades, "event-driven programming" (EDP) has emerged as a central and almost ubiquitous concept in modern software development: Graphical user interfaces are self-evident in most mobile and web-based applications, as well as in many embedded systems, and they are most often based on reacting to events. To facilitate…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

This paper reports on CodeOrama, a visualization tool that displays the entire source code in a two-dimensional representation created to support the representation of a complex code in block-based programming environments, like Scratch, by using a two-dimension table. CodeOrama can be used by the students for the development of their programs as…

Project-based learning (PBL) engages students deeply with course concepts and empowers them to drive their own learning through the development of solutions to real-world challenges. By taking ownership of and completing a project that they designed, students develop and demonstrate creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration skills. This…

Continuing to fill the literature gap, this research replicated and expands a prior study of student performance in database normalization in an introductory database course. The data was collected from four different universities, each having different prerequisite courses for their database course. Student performance on a database normalization…

This study investigates the effects of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for computational thinking (CT) on managing cognitive load and enhancing problem-solving skills in collaborative programming. Four different scaffolding conditions were provided to help learners optimize cognitive load and improve their problem-solving abilities. A total…

Background: Academic help-seeking benefits students' achievement, but existing literature either studies important factors in students' selection of all help resources via self-reported surveys or studies their help-seeking behavior in one or two separate help resources via actual help-seeking records. Little is known about whether computing…

Query languages are the foundations of database teaching and education practices. The broad adoption of graph databases contrasts with the limited research into how they are taught. Contrary to relational databases, graph databases allow navigational queries with higher expressivity and lack an a priori schema. In this article, we design a…