Background: Automatically graded programming assignments provide instant feedback to students and significantly reduce manual grading time for instructors. However, creating comprehensive suites of test cases for programming problems within automatic graders can be time-consuming and complex. The effort needed to define test suites may deter some…

Background: The idea of computational thinking is underpinned by the belief that anyone can learn and use the underlying concepts of computer science to solve everyday problems. However, most studies on the topic have investigated the development of computational thinking through programming activities, which are cognitively demanding. There is a…

Promoting the cultivation of computational thinking (CT) skills in programming activities has become a key issue in the K-12 curriculum, however, there is no unified conclusion on how to design programming activities to promote the acquisition of CT skills more effectively. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of using…

Background: Students experience higher-order thinking skills by finding ways to solve the problem, debugging errors while applying the solution, and testing the solution in programming. However, the inability to create schemas that will characterise programming structures is one of the difficulties during this process. Objectives: This study aimed…

Background: Problem-solving is a multidimensional and dynamic process that requires and interlinks cognitive, metacognitive, and affective dimensions of learning. However, current approaches practiced in computing education research (CER) are not sufficient to capture information beyond the basic programming process data (i.e., IDE-log data).…

This study compares the effects of object-oriented and robot programming activities on programming achievement, abstraction, problem solving, and motivation. In the study, two consecutive experimental cases were conducted to examine the consistency of findings. The research sample comprises 81 tenth-grade students undergoing vocational secondary…

Past research has shown that student problem-solving skills may be used to determine student final exam performance. This study reports on the relationship between student perceived problem-solving skills and academic performance in introductory programming, in formative and summative programming assessment tasks. We found that the more effective…

Computational thinking (CT), the ability to devise computational solutions for real-life problems, has received growing attention from both educators and researchers. To better improve university students' CT competence, collaborative programming is regarded as an effective learning approach. However, how novice programmers develop CT competence…

Intelligent tutoring and personalization are considered as the two most important factors in the research of learning systems and environments. An effective tool that can be used to improve problem-solving ability is an Intelligent Tutoring System which is capable of mimicking a human tutor's actions in implementing a one-to-one personalized and…