Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

Computational thinking (CT) has been introduced in primary schools worldwide. However, rich classroom-based evidence and research on how to assess and support students' CT through programming are particularly scarce. This empirical study investigates 4th grade students' (N = 57) CT in a comparatively comprehensive and fine-grained manner by…

This paper elaborates on the notion of object-oriented collaborative learning by building on empirical material from two case studies in higher education. Prior empirical findings show how knowledge objects are evolving entities, shaped by the interactions between participants, and how students learn from engaging in knowledge practice that…

This article presents a study aimed at examining the novice student answers in an introductory programming final e-exam to identify misconceptions and types of errors. Our study used the Delphi concept inventory to identify student misconceptions and skill, rule, and knowledge-based errors approach to identify the types of errors made by novices…

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…

Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of…

Program visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical--often animated--and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of…

One of the problematic issues in the content development for learning environments is the process of importing various types of course material into the environment. This paper describes a method for importing material into the A&O open learning environment by introducing a material model for metadata recognized by the environment. The first…

Data structures and algorithms are core issues in computer programming. However, learning them is challenging for most students and many of them have various types of misconceptions on how algorithms work. In this study, we discuss the problem of identifying misconceptions on the principles of how algorithms work. Our context is algorithm…

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…