Despite the importance of computer science education and computational thinking, there have been limited examples of computer science education at K-12 classrooms that authentically represents the work of computer scientists, especially programming. One reason is the lack of a measurable definition of computational thinking and a programming…

In this study half of 52 sixth graders learned to program in MSWLogo and the other half in Drape. An analysis of students' test scores revealed that Drape (an iconic language) seemed to have a steeper learning curve than MSWLogo (a textual language). However, as students gradually became more familiar with either language, the difference in…

Computational precision is sometimes given short shrift in a first programming course. Treating this topic requires discussing integer and floating-point number representations and inaccuracies that may result from their use. An example of a moderately simple programming problem from elementary statistics was examined. It forced students to…

The primary purpose of the study was to determine if a treatment that concentrates on building programs from previously written modules can improve the decomposition processes of novice programmers in the C++ programming language and, hence, programming performance. For purposes of performance analysis, a subsample of 23 students was divided into…

The primary purpose of this study was to analyze different perceptions displayed by novice programmers in the C++ programming language, and determine if modularization ability could be improved by an instructional treatment that concentrated on solving computer programs from previously existing modules. This study attempted to answer the following…