Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

Background and Context: Students' programming projects are often assessed on the basis of their tests as well as their implementations, most commonly using test adequacy criteria like branch coverage, or, in some cases, mutation analysis. As a result, students are implicitly encouraged to use these tools during their development process (i.e., so…

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…

Objectives: Code style is an important aspect of text-based programming because programs written with good style are considered easier to understand and change and so improve the maintainability of the delivered software product. However teaching code style is complicated by the existence of many style guides and standards that contain…

The types of programming errors that novice programmers make and struggle to resolve have long been of interest to researchers. Various past studies have analyzed the frequency of compiler diagnostic messages. This information, however, does not have a direct correlation to the types of errors students make, due to the inaccuracy and imprecision…

Novice programmers often encounter difficulties performing debugging tasks effectively. Even if modern development environments (IDEs) provide high-level support for navigating through code elements and for identifying the right conditions leading to the bug, debugging still requires considerable human effort. Programmers usually have to make…

This article builds on prior work that aims to measure computational learning (CL) during middle school. Since game computational sophistication (GCS) has been used as a proxy for a student's engagement in CL we build on their model to more completely describe the relationship between different types of building blocks of computer games and GCS.…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

Teaching is the process of conveying knowledge and skills to learners. It involves preventing misunderstandings or correcting misconceptions that learners have acquired. Thus, effective teaching relies on solid knowledge of the discipline, but also a good grasp of where learners are likely to trip up or misunderstand. In programming, there is much…

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.…

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For…

Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work, is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how…

Programming skills are an increasingly desirable asset across disciplines; however, learning to program continues to be difficult for many students. To improve pedagogy, we need to better understand the concepts that students find difficult and which have the biggest impact on their learning. Threshold-concept theory provides a potential lens on…

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) hardware is becoming more affordable and accessible. However, there is limited work investigating ways to design software that broadens participation with BCI technology. In this article, we present a block-based programming environment designed to assist novice programmers with creating BCI applications. We also…

Various software engineering (SE) curricula in higher education have started including courses on global software engineering (GSE), carried out as internationally distributed project-based courses. These courses, known for their closeness to "real-world" work experience, emphasize the importance of involving industry partners as…