Educational curricula in data analysis are increasingly fundamental to statistics, data science, and a wide range of disciplines. The educational literature comparing coding syntaxes for instruction in data analysis recommends utilizing a simple syntax for introductory coursework. However, there is limited prior work to assess the pedagogical…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Structured Query Language (SQL) is still the de facto database query language widely used in industry and taught in almost all university level database courses. The role of SQL is further strengthened by the emergence of NewSQL systems which use SQL as their query language as well as some NoSQL systems, e.g., Cassandra and DynamoDB, which base…

Software is an integral part of our lives. It controls the cars we drive every day, the ships we send into space, and even our toasters. It is everywhere and we can easily download more. Software solves many real-world problems and satisfies many needs. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is a rising demand for software engineers to maintain existing…

Programming is an essential skill that many computing students are expected to master. However, programming can be difficult to learn. Successfully interpreting compiler error messages (CEMs) is crucial for correcting errors and progressing toward success in programming. Yet these messages are often difficult to understand and pose a barrier to…

Programming is recognised as one of seven grand challenges in computing education and attracts much attention in computing education research. Most research in the area concerns teaching methods, educational technology and student understanding/misconceptions. Typically, evaluation of learning outcome takes place during or immediately following…

The authors underline their opinion that it is preferable to organise the extracurricular education on city level instead of forming autonomous school groups. Putting together students from different schools forces them to share their knowledge and programming techniques. All this helps them get familiar with new practices and experience and…

In the information systems field there are numerous programming languages that can be used in specifying the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. In the literature it has been argued that a lack of pragmatic and semantic consideration decreases the effectiveness of such specifications. In other words, to simply understand the syntactic…

One of the major issues related to teaching an introductory programming course is the excessive amount of time spent on the language's syntax, which leaves little time for developing skills in program design and solution creativity. The wide variation in the students' backgrounds, coupled with the traditional classroom (one size-fits-all) teaching…

In this paper, we present the results from a two-part study. We analyze 60 programs written by novice programmers aged 16-19 after their first programming course, in either Java or Python. The aim is to find difficulties independent of the language used, and such originating from the language. Second, we analyze the transition from a…