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…

This study describes the most relevant problems and solutions found in the literature on teaching and learning of object-oriented programming (OOP). The identification of the problem was based on tertiary studies from the IEEE Xplore, Scopus, ACM Digital Library and Science Direct repositories. The problems and solutions identified were ranked…

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…

Learning basic programming concepts in computer science-related fields poses a challenge for students, to the extent that it becomes an academic-social problem, resulting in high failure and dropout rates. Proposed solutions to the problem can be found in the literature, such as the development of new programming languages and environments, the…

While the introduction of memory-safe programming languages into embedded, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) offers an opportunity to eliminate many system vulnerabilities, a pragmatic adoption of memory-safe programming languages often necessitates incremental deployment due to practical development constraints, such as the size of many legacy code…

Physical experiments in classrooms have many benefits for student learning, including increased student interest, participation and knowledge retention. While experiments are common in engineering and physics classes, they are seldom used in first-year calculus, where the focus is on solving problems analytically and, occasionally, numerically. In…

In the wake of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, computer programming has become a foundational competency across engineering disciplines. Yet engineering students often resist the notion that computer programming is a skill relevant to their future profession. Here are presented two activities aimed at supporting the early development…

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,…

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…

Debugging is essential for identifying and rectifying errors in programming, yet time constraints and students' trivialization of errors often hinder progress. This study examines differences in debugging challenges and strategies among students with varying computational thinking (CT) competencies using weekly coding journals from an online…

Conversational user interfaces (CUI), including voice interfaces, which allow users to converse with computers via voice, are gaining wide popularity. VoiceBots allow users to receive a response in real-time, regardless of the communication device. VoiceBots have been explored in fields such as customer service to automate repetitive queries and…

Automated detection of facial emotions has been an interesting topic for multiple decades in social and behavioral research but is only possible very recently. In this tutorial, we review three popular artificial intelligence based emotion detection programs that are accessible to R programmers: Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and…

Many areas of mathematics naturally lend themselves to machine-based computing environments, which suggests that computational environments may serve as useful mediating tools for the teaching and learning of mathematical content. While some mathematics classes are leveraging the use of computational tools, the implementation of computer…

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…

CODAP is a widely-used programming environment for secondary school data science. Its direct-manipulation-based design offers many advantages to learners, especially younger students. Unfortunately, these same advantages can become a liability when it comes to repeating operations consistently, replaying operations (for reproducibility), and also…