The dream of intelligent assistants to enhance programmer productivity has now become a concrete reality, with rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various domains based on the vast amount of data used to train them. However, tasks which require structured reasoning or…

Block-based programming environments have become increasingly commonplace in computer science education. Despite a rapidly expanding ecosystem of block-based programming environments, text-based languages remain the dominant programming paradigm outside of educational contexts, motivating the transition from block-based to text-based programming.…

The field of Cryptography is rapidly evolving, and the development of quantum computers is on the rise. Lattice-based cryptosystems are promising candidates for quantum resistance, and it is the responsibility of institutions to prepare students for related careers. Undergraduate students in mathematics and mathematics-adjacent fields can -- and…

Data science programming presents many challenges for programmers entering the field. Roughly, data science programming can be broken up into several activities: data wrangling, analysis, modeling, or visualization. Data wrangling is an important first step that involves cleaning and shaping tabular data--or dataframes--into a form amenable for…

This qualitative study explored secondary-level building administrators' preparedness to supervise and support special education programming. It investigated knowledge gaps, needs, and the role of induction programs. Interviews with twelve administrators were conducted, transcribed, coded, and analyzed through grounded theory methodology. Findings…

Learning to write programs is hard, but many fail to even learn basic program reading skills, such as mentally tracing a program to predict its behavior. This dissertation argues a new theory of programming language knowledge that includes mappings from syntax to semantics and their nested combinations can serve as the basis for more granular…

Software vulnerabilities in commercial products are an issue of national importance. The most prevalent breaches are input validation vulnerabilities, and these are easily avoidable. This dissertation contributes to cybersecurity education with a set of hands-on interventions tailored for three CS courses, a set of reflection prompts to encourage…

Secure Code Education (SCE) is the compliance requirement for many organizations in the U.S. Consequently, many U.S. companies spend large sums on programs and tooling to meet this requirement and to upskill their developers. This tooling is largely underutilized. Classes beyond the bare required minimum are often not taken advantage of, leaving…

At an unrivaled and enduring pace, computing has transformed the world, resulting in demand for a universal fourth foundation beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic: computational thinking (CT). Despite increasingly widespread acceptance of CT as a crucial competency for all, transforming education systems accordingly has proven complex. The…

Schools have transitioned from single-component health and wellness programs to comprehensive initiatives aimed at fostering continual and sustained improvement in children's overall health and wellness. These interventions, with a focus on knowledge and behavior change, can effectively promote the adoption of healthy behaviors among children.…

Introductory computer programming (i.e. CS1) is the entry point into the computer science major at higher education institutions worldwide. It introduces foundational concepts to students that are then built upon in future courses. Computer science as a whole has struggled to attract and retain students in the major, particularly women and…

A critical component of modern software development practices, particularly continuous integration (CI), is the halt of development activities in response to test failures which requires further investigation and debugging. As software changes, regression testing becomes vital to verify that new code does not affect existing functionality.…

The purpose of this study is to analyze which behaviors are or are not helpful for debugging when a novice is in a state of unproductive persistence. Further, this project will exploratorily use a variety of analytical techniques -- including association rule mining, process mining, frequent sequence mining, and machine learning-- in order to…

I situate computer programming as a cultural practice. I develop this perspective in two ways: exploring how programming practices can support intercultural learning, and examining how programming tools themselves embed cultural assumptions and values. For the former, I study how relationships across difference are formed over computing activities…

This dissertation presents the first Systemic Functional Linguistics-based analysis of the teaching/learning of computational thinking through computer programming and comprehensive analysis of discourse of a whole computer programming course at any educational level. The current educational research raises questions about the nature of authentic…