To meet the employment demands in the information technology industry, it is crucial for higher education institutions to design sustainable curricula to prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed to enter and stay competitive in an ever-changing workforce. A review of one Mid-Atlantic University's information technology programs…

ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot with automatic code generation abilities, has shown its promise in improving the quality of programming education by providing learners with opportunities to better understand the principles of programming. However, limited empirical studies have explored the impact of ChatGPT on learners' programming processes. This…

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex, hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating feedback for students. We investigate using LLMs to generate feedback for fixing syntax errors in Python programs, a key scenario in introductory programming. More concretely, given a student's buggy program, our goal is…

Background and Context: automated feedback for programming assignments has great potential in promoting just-in-time learning, but there has been little work investigating the design of feedback in this context. Objective: to investigate the impacts of different designs of automated feedback on student learning at a fine-grained level, and how…

The user interface (UI) is a key component of an interactive software application; therefore, it is important to provide software developers with basic UI design skills. However, teaching UI design is challenging, even at a basic level, and there is little teaching support. In this article, we investigate the benefits of the feedback-enriched…

The assessment of program functionality can generally be accomplished with straight-forward unit tests. However, assessing the design quality of a program is a much more difficult and nuanced problem. Design quality is an important consideration since it affects the readability and maintainability of programs. Assessing design quality and giving…

Background and Context: Researchers and practitioners have begun to incorporate collaboration in programming because of its reported instructional and professional benefits. However, younger students need guidance on how to collaborate in environments that require substantial interpersonal interaction and negotiation. Previous research indicates…

Building information modeling (BIM) has been a disruptive development in the global architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industry. While architecture schools have sought to integrate BIM into their curricula, most current pedagogical approaches and lessons are derived from engineering and construction management…

Students in introductory computer science courses, are learning to program. Indeed, most students perceive that learning to code is the central topic explored in the courses. Students spend an enormous amount of time struggling to learn the syntax and understand semantics of a particular language. Instructors spend a similar amount of time reading…

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While…

Aim/Purpose: This research aims to describe layering of career-like experiences over existing curriculum to improve perceived educational value. Background: Feedback from students and regional businesses showed a clear need to increase student's exposure to career-like software development projects. The initial goal was to develop an…

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…

Background and Context: Computational Thinking (CT) is a skill all students should learn. This requires using inclusive approaches to teach CT to a wide spectrum of students. However, strategies for teaching CT to students with exceptionalities are not well studied. Objective: This study draws on lessons learned in two fourth-grade classrooms --…

Purpose: This study aims to examine if a pedagogical agent's expressed anger, when framed as a feedback cue, can enhance mental effort and learning performance in a multimedia learning environment than expressed happiness. Design/methodology/approach: A between-subjects experiment was conducted in which learners engaged with a multimedia learning…

A parsing algorithm visualizer is a tool that visualizes the construction of a parser for a given context-free grammar and then illustrates the use of that parser to parse a given string. Parsing algorithm visualizers are used to teach the course on compiler construction which in invariably included in all undergraduate computer science curricula.…