When the new programming language Pascal was developed in the 1970's, Walter Gander did not like it because because many features which he appreciated in prior programming languages were missing in Pascal. For example the block structure was gone, there were no dynamical arrays, no functions or procedures were allowed as parameters of a procedure,…

Spark, one of the products offered by MyQ (formerly Plethora), is a game-based platform meticulously designed to introduce students to the foundational concepts of computer science. By navigating through logical challenges, users delve into topics like abstraction, loops, and graph patterns. Setting itself apart from its counterparts, Spark boasts…

Teaching software engineering (SWE) as a core computer science course (ACM, 2013) is a challenging task. The challenge lies in the emphasis on what a large-scale software means, implementing teamwork, and teaching abstraction in software design while simultaneously engaging students into reasonable coding tasks. The abstraction of the system…

Computer programming skills have been growing as a professional competence also to unqualified end-users who need to develop software in their professional practice. Quality evaluation models of end-user-developed products are still scarce. In this paper, we propose a metric that leverages "When", a condition typically found in…

Concurrency is a complex to learn topic that is becoming more and more relevant, such that many undergraduate Computer Science curricula are introducing it in introductory programming courses. This paper investigates the combined use of Sonic Pi and Team-Based Learning to mitigate the difficulties in early exposure to concurrency. Sonic Pi, a…

This autoethnographic paper is part of a special issue trying to answer the question "How to design or choose languages for programming novices?" I will describe how my programming language Hedy was created, how the initial design goals were formed, how my perspectives on learning and teaching changed along the way, and how Hedy changed…

The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth's book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught,…

The work of Niklaus Wirth, designer of the Pascal programming language, has led to the introduction of programming in schools in many countries often leading to a transformation in the way of thinking. In this article, we provide a retrospective analysis of the Lithuanian experience driven by Pascal and discuss the main ideas about teaching…

This paper presents an approach to the initial programming learning using the four components instructional model and the Alice software. The quasi-experimental design was developed with two groups of students that attended two schools with very different socioeconomic status and school retention levels. The differences obtained in the mean of the…

The development of computational thinking is a major topic in K-12 education. Many of these experiences focus on teaching programming using block-based languages. As part of these activities, it is important for students to receive feedback on their assignments. Yet, in practice it may be difficult to provide personalized, objective and consistent…

In the last years, a growing trend in different educational contexts focused on Computational Thinking (CT) skills acquisition for both in-service teachers and students. But very low attention has been paid to pre-service teachers' education in regards to CT skills. To solve this issue, an empirical experimentation has been carried out with 141…

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN's) are nowadays a common subject in different curricula of graduate and postgraduate studies. Due to the complex algorithms involved and the dynamic nature of ANN's, simulation software has been commonly used to teach this subject. This software has usually been developed specifically for learning purposes, because…

Social bookmarking services became very popular recently. Easy of use, possibility to share and discover in addition to accessibility though the Internet, turns social bookmarking systems into powerful repository of shared knowledge. Obviously this attracts attention of educational institutions and recently such systems started to appear under…

When first introduced to the analysis of algorithms, students are taught how to assess the best and worst cases, whereas the mean and amortized costs are considered advanced topics, usually saved for graduates. When presenting the latter, aggregate analysis is explained first because it is the most intuitive kind of amortized analysis, often…