How to support students in programming learning has been a great research challenge in the last years. To address this challenge, prior works have mainly focused on proposing solutions based on syntactic analysis to provide students with personalized feedback about their grammatical programming errors and misconceptions. However, syntactic…

Having students read news articles or novels, watch television snippets, engage in class discussions, essay-writing, emailing, and drafting letters are excellent ways to broach any number of society's systemic and oppressive social maladies. Engaging in these activities in the English language arts classroom can serve as a catalyst to encourage…

With the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), assessing K-12 science teachers' self-efficacy in Computational Thinking (CT) is an important research gap to study. Bandura defines self-efficacy as awareness of the individual's potential and capabilities to accomplish a goal. Teaching efficacy beliefs is a significant identifier…

Logic Programming (LP) follows the declarative programming paradigm, which novice students often find hard to grasp. The limited availability of visual teaching aids for LP can lead to low motivation for learning. In this paper, we present a platform for teaching and learning Prolog in Virtual Worlds, which enables the visual interpretation and…

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…

This article explores children's development of problem-solving practices through multimodal engagements in digital activities. The study is based on analyses of a video recorded peer group activity in which two children, within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software "Scratch," collaboratively work to solve…

The main purpose of the study was to investigate K-2 children's development of computational thinking skills through an activity with Blue-Bot, a floor programmable robot. Twenty children between six and seven years old participated in the study. Children were engaged in problem-solving activities with the Blue-Bot to learn how to program it and…

Hackathons, the time-bound collaborative project-based competitions increasingly popular with undergraduate CS students, are both transformative and problematic. On one hand, they are unique opportunities to apply skills learned in the classroom to real-world, interest driven projects that celebrate risk taking, collaboration, and playfulness. On…

In this article, we discuss the possible connection between the programming language and the paradigm behind it, and programmers' tendency to adopt an external or internal perspective of the system they develop. Based on a qualitative analysis, we found that when working with the visual, interobject language of live sequence charts (LSC),…

The study aimed to present suggestions for how a design thinking (DT) approach can be applied in the processes of teaching programming to gifted students and to reveal its effects on the teaching process. The case study method was used. 5 different DT tasks were defined to create solutions for an unstructured problem by using programming tools and…

This study aims to analyze how pre-service informatics teachers design learning scenarios with robotics to teach programming fundamentals and to promote computational thinking skills. A descriptive and exploratory case study design was implemented with 26 pre-service informatics teachers. Data were collected from the participants using qualitative…

Background and Context: Women are underrepresented in the field of computer science, a trend that in part can be traced to girls' early experiences with the discipline. Objective: Our aim is to show how three girls who became strong coders talked about their debugging practice at the intersection of problem solving, emotion, and identity. Method:…

Sorting is a fundamental computing concept. As for today, it is taught at the secondary school level. However, this kind of algorithm is an obstacle for some students due to its high level of abstraction. To prevent discouragement as well as to incorporate a fun and challenging algorithmic task, a novel tablet-based digital game,…

Open-ended tasks are common in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. However, as far as we know, no tools have been developed to assist in the assessment of the solution process of open-ended questions. In this paper, we propose the use of analysis of traces as a tool to address this need. To illustrate this approach,…

Problem solving skills are considered an important component in learning to program in an introductory programming (IP) course for novices. This study introduced a PROSOLVE game to enhance problem solving skills of novice programmers in the introductory programming course. The game is based on pseudo-code technique. A survey was employed to…