Scratch is widely used as an introductory educational tool for computer programming. However, little is known about how the action of adding favorite projects on Scratch social media influences programming skill improvement. On Scratch social media, learners select personally intriguing projects to view and learn from. Favorite projects both…

Computational Thinking (CT) has evolved as an essential competency for K-12 students, and programming practices are recognized as the key way to facilitate CT development. However, most studies of CT development in middle graders have focused on visual programming, lacking evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of Python programming. Therefore,…

The information society is part of current life, and algorithmic thinking and programming are relevant for everybody regardless of educational background. Today's world needs professionals with computing competencies from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Societies) and non-WEIRD contexts. Traditional programming…

Despite the elevated importance of Data Science in Statistics, there exists limited research investigating how students learn the computing concepts and skills necessary for carrying out data science tasks. Computer Science educators have investigated how students debug their own code and how students reason through foreign code. While these…

Educational technologists and practitioners have made substantial strides in developing affordable digital and tangible resources to support both formal and informal computer science instruction. However, there is a lack of research on practice-based assignments, such as Internet of Things (IoT) projects, that allow undergraduate students to…

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…

Background: As one of the mainstream forms of programming education, educational robotics (ER) have been a crucial way to develop K-12 students' programming ability. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to clarify the content of programming ability, to verify the effectiveness of ER as a teaching method to improve students' programming…

Learning object oriented programming (OOP) has been a daunting and challenging task for students across tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Various literatures have suggested the use of technology as a way to improve students' understanding of the subject. In this study, the overall aim is to investigate the effect of Imikode- a virtual reality (VR)…

This study reports the findings of a program that aims to develop pre-service science teachers' computational problem-solving skills and views on using information and communications technology in science education. To this end, pre-service science teachers were trained on computational thinking, computational problem solving, designing an…

Computational Thinking (CT) has emerged in recent years as a thematic trend in education in many countries and several initiatives have been developed for its inclusion in school curricula. There are many pedagogical strategies to promote the development of elementary school students' CT skills and knowledge. Unplugged learning tasks, block-based…

In the wake of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, computer programming has become a foundational competency across engineering disciplines. Yet engineering students often resist the notion that computer programming is a skill relevant to their future profession. Here are presented two activities aimed at supporting the early development…

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

The effective teaching of the concept of programming, where critical thinking is an important factor, is not so easy in secondary education. New teaching approaches, including, game-based learning, may provide a solution due to their inclusion of more fun and diverse activities but they still lack the active participation of the students in the…

The advent of the high-throughput next-generation sequencing produced a large number of biological data. Knowledge discovery from the huge amount of available biological data requires researchers to develop solid skills in biology and computer science. As the majority of the Bioinformatics professionals are either computer science or life sciences…

The use of Scratch programming in introducing text-based programming to novices at all levels of education has gained prominence in computer science but is still hardly known among pre-service teachers. With affordances of Scratch in learning text-based programming, we present an experience report on how we supported our first-year pre-service…