This study investigates the effects of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for computational thinking (CT) on managing cognitive load and enhancing problem-solving skills in collaborative programming. Four different scaffolding conditions were provided to help learners optimize cognitive load and improve their problem-solving abilities. A total…

Students learning computer science frequently struggle with debugging errors in their code. These struggles can have significant downstream effects--negatively influencing how students assess their programming ability and contributing to their decision to drop out of CS courses. However, debugging instruction is often an overlooked topic, and…

Background and Context: Multiple studies report that experienced instructors lack consensus on the difficulty of programming tasks for novices. However, adequately gauging task difficulty is needed for alignment: to select and structure tasks in order to assess what students can and cannot do. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine…

The aim of this explanatory study is to identify the causes of intrinsic cognitive load in programming process. For this purpose, a method based on two dimensions; programming knowledge types (syntactic, semantic, and strategic) and programming constructs was proposed. The proposed method was tested with high school students enrolled in Computer…

Cognitive ability is closely associated with the acquisition of programming skills, and enhancing learners' cognitive ability is a crucial factor in improving the efficacy of programming education. Adaptive feedback strategies can provide learners with personalized support based on their learning context, which helps to stimulate their interest…

Background: Coding has become an integral part of STEM education. However, novice learners face difficulties in processing codes within embedded structures (also termed nested structures). This study aimed to investigate the cognitive mechanism underlying the processing of embedded coding structures based on hierarchical complexity theory, which…

Computational thinking is an important competence for learners in the twenty-first century. As an effective approach for cultivating competence in computational thinking, programming education has been extended from college to elementary school teaching. However, it is challenging to engage beginners in programming in elementary school education.…

Background: Being easy to learn and fun, block-based programming tools are widely used to teach students introductory programming. Scratch and LEGO robots are two popular block-based programming tools. However, the objects they manipulate are completely different. Scratch manipulates graphical virtual sprites, whereas LEGO robots manipulate…

Background and Context: Current programming learning research often compares novices and experienced programmers, leaving early learning stages and emotional and cognitive states under-explored. Objective: Our study investigates relationships between cognitive and emotional states and learning performance in early stage programming learners with…

Novice programmers, who have yet to form effective mental models of the domain, often experience high cognitive load, low confidence, and high anxiety, negatively affecting learning and retention rates. These cognitive and affective limitations pose an instructional challenge. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a whole-task…

This study investigated the computational thinking (CT) practices of eight pre-service teachers through their Scratch and Python programs. Conducted within an undergraduate-level computer science education course, students learned CT concepts via parallel instruction in block-based programming (Scratch) and text-based programming (Python). The…

Flipped classroom is one of the important teaching modes among many novel teaching methods in recent years, students watch the video in the pre-class. However, if students cannot focus on the pre-class video learning or have problems with the learning content, the learning effect will be less than expected. Therefore, this research proposes a…

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners' computational thinking. Design/methodology/approach: By…

Significant interest in teaching children to code since Preschool Education has arisen in recent years. This paper focuses on the benefits of preschoolers learning to code at such short age. The research questions are whether by coding they can improve skills such as sequencing and plotting a route? Which factors influence the learning? And, to…