Debugging (or troubleshooting) provides a rich context to foster problem-solving. Yet, while we know much about some problems and strategies that novices face in programming on-screen, we know far less about debugging and troubleshooting in the context of physical computing, where coding issues may overlap with materially embedded problems. In…

This paper focuses on a historically understudied area in computing education: attending to students' *design thinking* in university-level introductory programming courses. I offer an account of one student--"Rebecca"--and her experiences and code from a second-semester course on programming concepts for engineers. Using data from both…

The goal of this paper is to bring new insights to the study of social learning processes by designing measures of collaboration using high-frequency sensor data. More specifically, we are interested in understanding the interplay between moments of collaboration and cooperation, which is an understudied area of research. We collected a multimodal…

In this paper, I discuss undergraduate students' engagement in basic Python programming while solving combinatorial problems. Students solved tasks that were designed to involve programming, and they were encouraged to engage in activities of prediction and reflection. I provide data from two paired teaching experiments, and I outline how the task…

When teachers, researchers, and students describe productively responding to moments of failure in the learning process, what might this mean? Blending prior theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between failure and learning, and empirical results from four data sets that are part of a larger design-based research project, we…

Creating explanations is an important process for students, not only to make connections between novel information and background knowledge, but also to be able to communicate their understanding of any given topic. This article explores students' explanations in the context of computational science and engineering, an important interdisciplinary…

This article integrates an ecological approach and design-based research in computer science education research by following the simultaneous development of a computer programming environment and curriculum for elementary school age children over 2-1/2 years. We studied the alignment of the affordances provided by the programming environment and…

Presents ongoing research for constructing formal models of learning in rich problem-solving domains. The underlying framework for the research is aimed at integrating models of active, goal-oriented learning processes with theories of problem-solving and cognitive skill development. Indicates that the particular self-explanation and…

Two experiments involved an intelligent tutoring system for the Carnegie Mellon University Lisp Tutor using production system theories of transfer and analogical problem solving. Results suggested that acquisition of cognitive skills is facilitated by high degrees of metacognition, which includes higher level monitoring of states of knowledge,…

Four experiments supported the hypothesis that, when learning to use equipment such as computers, if the material to be learned has an intrinsically high degree of interaction between elements, then learning might be facilitated by not having the equipment present. Thus, an analysis of intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load can lead to…