Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…

Teaching students statistical programming languages while simultaneously teaching them how to debug erroneous code is challenging. The traditional programming course focuses on error-free learning in class while students' experiences outside of class typically involve error-full learning. While error-free teaching consists of focused lectures…

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…

Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics or the institution it is presented in. To better integrate computational thinking in introductory physics, we need to understand what physicists find important about computational thinking in introductory physics. We…

This paper introduces a teaching process to develop students' problem-solving and programming efficacy in an introductory computer programming course. The proposed teaching practice provides step-by-step guidelines on using worked-out examples of code to demonstrate the applications of programming concepts. These coding demonstrations explicitly…

We developed an interactive online textbook that interleaves R programming activities with text as a way to facilitate students' understanding of statistical ideas while minimizing the cognitive and emotional burden of learning programming. In this exploratory study, we characterize the attitudes and experiences of 672 undergraduate students as…

Programming and coding skills are in high demand, and can provide access to employment in growing fields. But a high percentage of undergraduates who enroll in relevant programs do not persist until they achieve competency in the subject and employment in the field. Revel for "Introduction to Java Programming" aims to give students an…

Programming and coding skills are in high demand, and can provide access to employment in growing fields. But a high percentage of undergraduates who enroll in relevant programs do not persist until they achieve competency in the subject and employment in the field. Revel is an interactive learning environment intended to help students prepare for…

Controlling complexity through the use of abstractions is a critical part of problem solving in programming. Thus, becoming proficient with procedural and data abstraction through the use of user-defined functions is important. Properly using functions for abstraction involves a number of other core concepts, such as parameter passing, scope and…

This dissertation was a comparative study of computer science in secondary schools in both Ireland and the United States. Computer science was a new subject compared to more established subjects in both Ireland and the United States. This dissertation looked at how this subject could be accessed by students in both countries. I used a document…

Our first year biomedical engineering course exposes students to multiple engineering and design techniques within an overarching theme of understanding health inequity. Currently, the semester-long curriculum excludes computational methods such as Python programming and Machine Learning, which are usually not introduced until more advanced BME…

CS1 courses are designed in Indian Institutions as a lecture course of three to four credits and one credit lab course. The issues related to curriculum design, instruction design, and students' learning manifest themselves as issues in the lab programs. This situation presents the lab instructor with an opportunity to understand and address the…

In the past 10 years, new data science courses and programs have proliferated at the collegiate level. As faculty and administrators enter the race to provide data science training and attract new students, the road map for teaching data science remains elusive. In 2019, 69 college and university faculty teaching data science courses and…

Knowledge tracing (KT) models are a popular approach for predicting students' future performance at practice problems using their prior attempts. Though many innovations have been made in KT, most models including the state-of-the-art Deep KT (DKT) mainly leverage each student's response either as correct or incorrect, ignoring its content. In…

This article describes a suite of student-created Shiny apps for teaching statistics and a field test of their short-term effectiveness. To date, more than 50 Shiny apps and a growing collection of associated lesson plans, designed to enrich the teaching of both introductory and upper division statistics courses, have been developed. The apps are…