In the last years, a growing trend in different educational contexts focused on Computational Thinking (CT) skills acquisition for both in-service teachers and students. But very low attention has been paid to pre-service teachers' education in regards to CT skills. To solve this issue, an empirical experimentation has been carried out with 141…

The goal of this paper is to bring new insights to the study of social learning processes by designing measures of collaboration using high-frequency sensor data. More specifically, we are interested in understanding the interplay between moments of collaboration and cooperation, which is an understudied area of research. We collected a multimodal…

Background and Context: Differences in children's and adolescents' initial attitudes about computing and other STEM fields may form during middle school and shape decisions leading to career entry. Early emerging differences in career interest may propagate a lack of diversity in computer science and programming fields. Objective: Though middle…

Collaboration is an important aspect of computing. In a classroom setting, working with others can increase a student's motivation to attempt more challenges, reduce the difficulty of complicated concepts, and bring about greater overall success. Despite extensive research in other domains, there has been minimal exploration within computing on…

Almost all educational systems still rely on traditional teaching methods: children must absorb huge uncorrelated amounts of information from various disciplines, multidisciplinary aspects are not developed, the fun factor is missing in most of the classes. Many children sometimes do not fully understand the presented theoretical concepts and…

Educational escape rooms aims to motivate students, to strengthen knowledge and evaluate learning. Pre-service teachers enrolled in "Computer Science and Digital Competency" course shows lack of motivation and difficulties to realise its usefulness in everyday practice, becoming an ideal context to apply this strategy. 157 students…

Researchers and educators are concerned about student success in tertiary programming courses, a situation that is even more pronounced in open and distance e-learning institutions. The aim of this study was to integrate 60 video lessons and compare passing and failing student in terms of their performance in JavaScript with three broad online…

Computer modeling promotes mechanistic reasoning when learners build and analyze models of complex systems to explore causal mechanisms and use models to generate patterns. StarLogo Nova (SLN), an agent-based modeling (ABM) environment, enables novice programmers to model a system's individual components and investigate its emergent, collective…

Computer Science Unplugged (CS-Unplugged) has been evolving in computer science education. It is a promising approach especially for introductory programming skills and computer science concepts. The skills of the computer science instructors/teachers, who convert the approach into practice, can be crucial during the preparation of CS-Unplugged…

In response to the call from the founders of the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory, this study aimed to explore the relationship of the interest loop with creativity in the context of robotics education. Specifically, we designed a programmable robotics course for primary school students. We attempted to explore in detail how interest loop,…

This study follows well-published educational criteria for assessing the quality of learning outcomes and investigates how these criteria are applied to descriptors of courses that include object oriented programming concepts. These quality criteria aim to ensure that learning outcomes are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and…

Innovations and progress in teaching, introduction of new academic disciplines in the curricula, changes in the paradigm of school education in Ukraine, the search for innovative tools, techniques and teaching methods, especially teaching STEAM create a good basis for teaching robotics. However, the organization of classes in robotics requires the…

Drawing on historical epistemology and considerations on the function of scientific modelling, this article investigates how in the mid-twentieth century electronic and programmable animal models became tools for exploring the inaccessible ontology of the human mind. The article examines how machines have informed our understanding of the learning…

There is an increasing need for research chemists and biochemists to have a basic familiarity with computer programming. Adding programming content to already crowded STEM undergraduate curricula, however, can be challenging. When programming content is introduced within the chemistry curriculum, it is most often incorporated into upper division…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pre-enrollment attributes of first-year students at Computer Science BSc programs of the University of Miskolc, Hungary in order to find those that mostly contribute to failure on the Programming Basics first-semester course and, consequently to dropout. Our aim is to detect at-risk students early,…