The dream of intelligent assistants to enhance programmer productivity has now become a concrete reality, with rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various domains based on the vast amount of data used to train them. However, tasks which require structured reasoning or…

Block-based programming environments have become increasingly commonplace in computer science education. Despite a rapidly expanding ecosystem of block-based programming environments, text-based languages remain the dominant programming paradigm outside of educational contexts, motivating the transition from block-based to text-based programming.…

The field of Cryptography is rapidly evolving, and the development of quantum computers is on the rise. Lattice-based cryptosystems are promising candidates for quantum resistance, and it is the responsibility of institutions to prepare students for related careers. Undergraduate students in mathematics and mathematics-adjacent fields can -- and…

Data science programming presents many challenges for programmers entering the field. Roughly, data science programming can be broken up into several activities: data wrangling, analysis, modeling, or visualization. Data wrangling is an important first step that involves cleaning and shaping tabular data--or dataframes--into a form amenable for…

Geometry processing holds a foundational position within the realm of computer graphics, with advancements in this field regularly published at SIGGRAPH annually. The journey from writing the paper to implementing the algorithms is a meticulous and error-prone process, demanding significant dedication and attention to detail. Authors frequently…

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…

While the introduction of memory-safe programming languages into embedded, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) offers an opportunity to eliminate many system vulnerabilities, a pragmatic adoption of memory-safe programming languages often necessitates incremental deployment due to practical development constraints, such as the size of many legacy code…

At an unrivaled and enduring pace, computing has transformed the world, resulting in demand for a universal fourth foundation beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic: computational thinking (CT). Despite increasingly widespread acceptance of CT as a crucial competency for all, transforming education systems accordingly has proven complex. The…

Piecewise latent growth modeling (PLGM) is a class of longitudinal models using a structural equation modeling framework to describe stage-like, discontinuous change of individuals over time. PLGM breaks the overall time window into non-overlapped segments where separate functions can be fitted to represent differential growth patterns for each…

This dissertation presents the first Systemic Functional Linguistics-based analysis of the teaching/learning of computational thinking through computer programming and comprehensive analysis of discourse of a whole computer programming course at any educational level. The current educational research raises questions about the nature of authentic…

The rise in demand for computer programming jobs has created a significant need for computer programming training. Online learning can be an effective tool for meeting the needs of these job demands. The challenge for universities is that computer programming is perceived as a difficult course by many students (Askar & Davenport, 2009; Baser,…

With the large demand for technology workers all around the world, more people are learning programming. Studies show that human tutoring is the most effective way to learn for novice programmers. However, problems such as the inaccessibility to physical classes, prohibitive costs, and the lack of educators may limit students' opportunities to…

Human beings by nature have a predisposition towards learning and the exploration of the natural world. We are intrinsically intellectual and social beings knitted with adaptive cognitive architectures. As Foot (2014) succinctly sums it up: "humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions" and they…

The study investigated the effect of Game Development-Based Learning (GDBL) on the ability of IT undergraduates in Jordanian universities to define the concepts of computer programming and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and their ability to program in C++. An instruction was designed for an eight-week-long online course to allow the…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers especially as the complexity of software solutions increase. There is precedent in industry to model information systems in terms of functions, structures, and behaviors. While constructing these models, abstraction and systems thinking are employed to determine elements essential to…