The principles of programming language design for learning and teaching have been described and discussed for several decades. Most influential was the work of Niklaus Wirth, describing principles such as simplicity, modularity, orthogonality, and readability. So why is this still an area of fundamental disagreement among educators? Why can…

Objectives: Java is a popular programming language for use in computing education, but it is difficult to get a wide picture of the issues that it presents for novices; most studies look only at the types or frequency of errors. In this observational study, we aim to learn how novices use different features of the Java language. Participants:…

Contribution: Most work on languages in computing education currently focuses on non-native speakers. In contrast, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this article is the first response to the call for research on terms that takes into account the terms used by novices in their language. Background: Terms are key factors in communication,…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Various similarity measures for source code have been proposed, many rely on edit- or tree-distance. To support a lecturer in quickly assessing live or online exercises with respect to "approaches taken by the students," we compare source code on a more abstract, semantic level. Even if novice student's solutions follow the same idea,…

Providing appropriate feedback is important when learning to program. However, it is still unclear how different feedback strategies affect learning outcomes in programming. This study designed four different two-step programming feedback strategies and explored their impact on novice programmers' academic achievement, learning motivations, and…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Educational data mining involves the application of data mining techniques to student activity. However, in the context of computer programming, many data mining techniques can not be applied because they require vector-shaped input, whereas computer programs have the form of syntax trees. In this paper, we present ast2vec, a neural network that…

This autoethnographic paper is part of a special issue trying to answer the question "How to design or choose languages for programming novices?" I will describe how my programming language Hedy was created, how the initial design goals were formed, how my perspectives on learning and teaching changed along the way, and how Hedy changed…

Serious games or educational games have attracted the interest of instructors and researchers for several years. In the field of education, serious games are being used for motivating students, attracting their interest in cognitively demanding fields and making the teaching and learning process more fun. Moreover, learning through implementing…

One of the aspects of programming that novices often struggle with is the understanding of abstract concepts, such as variables, loops, expressions, and especially Boolean operations. This paper aims to explore the effects of programming tools with different degrees of embodiment on learning Boolean operations in elementary school. To this end, 67…

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…

Several instructional approaches have been advanced for learning programming. However, effective ways of engaging beginners in programming in K-12 are still unclear, especially among low socioeconomic status learners in technology-deprived learning environments. Understanding the learning path of novice programmers will bridge this gap and explain…

The types of programming errors that novice programmers make and struggle to resolve have long been of interest to researchers. Various past studies have analyzed the frequency of compiler diagnostic messages. This information, however, does not have a direct correlation to the types of errors students make, due to the inaccuracy and imprecision…

Python is gaining popularity in academia as the preferred language to teach novices serial programming. The syntax of Python is clean, easy, and simple to understand. At the same time, it is a high-level programming language that supports multi programming paradigms such as imperative, functional, and object-oriented. Therefore, by default, it is…