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…

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…

This study explores students' cognitive processes while debugging programs by using an eye tracker. Students' eye movements during debugging were recorded by an eye tracker to investigate whether and how high- and low-performance students act differently during debugging. Thirty-eight computer science undergraduates were asked to debug two C…

Basic courses on logic are common in most computer science curricula. Students often have difficulties in handling formalisms and getting familiar with them. Educational software helps to motivate and improve the teaching-learning processes. Therefore, incorporating these kinds of tools becomes important, because they contribute to gaining…

The world all around us is rapidly developing. We are witnessing the rapid evolution of technology and communication. This means new challenges and responsibilities to future strategies and attitudes. Today's operating systems and development environments apply the principle of OOP; therefore today's developments are inconceivable without the…