Background and Context: Students' programming projects are often assessed on the basis of their tests as well as their implementations, most commonly using test adequacy criteria like branch coverage, or, in some cases, mutation analysis. As a result, students are implicitly encouraged to use these tools during their development process (i.e., so…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Intelligent tutoring systems have become increasingly common in assisting students but are often aimed at isolated subject-domain tasks without creating a scaffolding system from lower- to higher-level cognitive skills, with low-level skills often neglected. We designed and developed an intelligent tutoring system, CompPrehension, which aims to…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For…

Courses on computer programming are included in the curricula of almost all engineering disciplines. We surveyed the research literature and identified the techniques that are commonly used by instructors for teaching these courses. We observed that visual programming and game-based learning can enhance computational thinking and problem-solving…

The goal of this research was to investigate the effects of automated testing software on levels of student reflection and student performance. This was a self-selecting, between subjects design that examined the performance of students in introductory computer programming classes. Participants were given the option of using the Web-CAT…

Background and Context: In spite of the decades spent developing software visualization (SV), doubts still remain regarding their effectiveness. Furthermore, student engagement plays an important role in improving SV effectiveness as it is correlated with many positive academic outcomes. It has been shown that the existing SV has failed to engage…

Augmented Reality (AR) technology allows the inclusion of virtual elements on a vision of actual physical environment for the creation of a mixed reality in real time. This kind of technology can be used in educational settings. However, the current AR authoring tools present several drawbacks, such as, the lack of a mechanism for tracking the…

Software architecture plays an increasingly important role in complex software development. Its further application, however, is challenged by the fact that software architecture, over time, is often found not conformant to its implementation. This is usually caused by frequent development changes made to both artifacts. Against this background,…

The release of the latest LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics platform in September 2013 has provided a dilemma for many youth robotics leaders. There is a need to understand the differences in the Mindstorms NXT and EV3 in order to make future robotics purchases. In this article the differences are identified regarding software, hardware, sensors, the…

Software quality is one of the primary determinants of project management success. Stakeholders involved in software development widely agree that quality is important (Barney and Wohlin 2009). However, they may differ on what constitutes software quality, and which of its attributes are more important than others. Although, software quality…

This paper discusses the implementation of the Tri-Squared Test as an advanced statistical measure used to verify and validate the research outcomes of Educational Technology software. A mathematical and epistemological rational is provided for the transformative process of qualitative data into quantitative outcomes through the Tri-Squared Test…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Students in all areas of computing require knowledge of the computing device including software implementation at the machine level. Several courses in computer science curricula address these low-level details such as computer architecture and assembly languages. For such courses, there are advantages to studying real architectures instead of…