We are interested in understanding how university students learn to use programming as a tool for "authentic" mathematical investigations (i.e., similar to how some mathematicians use programming in their research work). The theoretical perspective of the instrumental approach offers a way of interpreting this learning in terms of…

In this qualitative case study, we examined in-service elementary school teachers' learning of coding and robotics in a blended professional learning course developed and delivered through the collaboration between university faculty and a school district. We focused on activity theory to understand and reveal the mediations, conflicts, and…

Problem-solving is one of the most important twenty-first-century skills and should be acquired at an early age. Since programming is a kind of problem-solving process, it may be seen in the context of problem-solving skills development. Hence, this study aims to identify the effectiveness of one of the most popular programming tools…

Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence…

Background and Context: Block-based programming is a popular approach to teaching introductory programming. Block-based programming often works in the context of microworlds, where students solve specific puzzles. It is used, for example, within the Hour of Code event, which targets millions of students. Objective: To identify design guidelines…

The purpose of this research is to get students' opinions on teaching programming to students with the help of educational games in the conditions of additional education in computer science. In order to carry out the study in accordance with the main purpose, the phenomenological approach, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The…

This study aims to explore the influences of the CS-unplugged activities in developing problem solving skills of preschool children. The participants were 11 children (4-5 aged) enrolled in a public preschool and Code.org activities were used as an instructional package. Activity evaluation form and interviews were used to understand children's…

There has been a conscious effort in the past decade to produce a more theoretical account of the use of technology for learning. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are being rapidly incorporated into learning technologies, significantly changing their affordances for teaching and learning. In this article I address the…

This study aims to identify the experiences of information technology (IT) students in learning computer programming. Specifically, the feelings towards learning programming and the challenges and difficulties encountered by IT students were determined. The researcher used a phenomenological approach to determine the commonality of lived…

Previous research has invested much effort in understanding how programming can contribute to the development of young learners' computational thinking (CT) in traditional K-12 classroom settings. Relatively few studies have examined programming for CT in informal online communities, especially for large scale quantitative research. With the…

Based on hundreds of thousands of hours of data about how students learn in massive open online courses, educational machine learning promises to help students who are learning to code. However, in most classrooms, students and assignments do not have enough historical data for feeding these data hungry algorithms. Previous work on predicting…

Robotics education has received widespread attention in K-12 education. Studies have pointed out that in robotics courses, learners face challenges in learning abstract content, such as constructing a robot with a good structure and writing programs to drive a robot to complete specific learning tasks. The present study proposed the embodied…

Computational thinking (CT) has received much attention in mathematics education in recent years, and researchers have begun to experiment with the integration of CT into mathematics education to promote students' CT and mathematical thinking (MT) development. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence and new theoretical perspectives on the…

Managers are increasingly being tasked with overseeing data-driven projects that incorporate prescriptive and predictive models. Furthermore, basic knowledge of the data analytics pipeline is a fundamental requirement in many modern organizations. Given the central importance of analytics in today's business environment, there is a growing demand…

This study aimed to investigate the impact of the Scratch programming environment on student engagement and academic performance in primary informatics education. The research was conducted over three academic years (2020-2023) in educational organizations (ADAN and Navoiy schools) involving 170 first and third-grade students. The Student…