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…

Systematic searching aims to find all possibly relevant research from multiple sources, the basis for an unbiased and comprehensive evidence base. Along with bibliographic databases, systematic reviewers use a variety of additional methods to minimise procedural bias. Citation chasing exploits connections between research articles to identify…

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the literature, including a meta-analysis, about the effectiveness of the use of Alice software in programming learning when compared to the use of a conventional programming language. Our research included studies published between the years 2000 and 2014 in the main databases. We gathered…

Pair programming is a software development technique with many cited benefits in learning and teaching. However, it is reported that novice programmers find several barriers to pairing up, typically due to the added communication that is required of this approach. This paper will present a literature review discussing the issue of communication,…

This article provides a review of educational research literature focused on pair programming in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Research suggests that the benefits of pair programming include increased success rates in introductory courses, increased retention in the major, higher quality software, higher student confidence in…

The notion of a system adapting itself to provide support for learning has always been an important issue of research for technology-enabled learning. One approach to provide adaptivity is to use social navigation approaches and techniques which involve analysing data of what was previously selected by a cluster of users or what worked for…

A key challenge of effective teaching is assessing and monitoring the extent to which students have assimilated the material they were taught. Concept mapping is a methodology designed to model what students have learned. In effect, it seeks to produce graphical representations (called concept maps) of the concepts that are important to a given…

This paper reviews the literature related to the learning and teaching of debugging computer programs. Debugging is an important skill that continues to be both difficult for novice programmers to learn and challenging for computer science educators to teach. These challenges persist despite a wealth of important research on the subject dating…