Introductory programming courses (CS1) are difficult for novices. Inspired by "Problem solving followed by instruction" and "Productive Failure" approaches, we define an original "necessity-driven" learning design. Students are put in an apparently well-known situation, but this time they miss an essential ingredient…

Serious games, or else educational games, for programming are considered to have a positive impact on learning programming. Specifically, serious games are considered to motivate students and engage them in playing and learning programming. However, more research is required in order to study their effects in learning programming, as well as their…

In the school year 2020-2021, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed distance learning (in Italian, the DAD acronym is used). Therefore, the Degree Course in Primary Education Sciences of the University of Perugia has proposed an innovative programme for the training of future teachers by developing a distance learning laboratory focusing coding and…

Students learn many concepts in the introductory statistics course, but even our most successful students end up with rigid, ritualized knowledge that does not transfer easily to new situations. In this article we describe our attempt to apply theories and findings from learning science to the design of a statistics course that aims to help…

R and Python are commonly used software languages for data analytics. Using these languages as the course software for the introductory course gives students practical skills for applying statistical concepts to data analysis. However, the reliance upon the command line is perceived by the typical nontechnical introductory student as sufficiently…

The assessment of program functionality can generally be accomplished with straight-forward unit tests. However, assessing the design quality of a program is a much more difficult and nuanced problem. Design quality is an important consideration since it affects the readability and maintainability of programs. Assessing design quality and giving…

The use of Scratch programming in introducing text-based programming to novices at all levels of education has gained prominence in computer science but is still hardly known among pre-service teachers. With affordances of Scratch in learning text-based programming, we present an experience report on how we supported our first-year pre-service…

In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Jeffrey Harring and Ms. Tessa Johnson introduce the linear mixed effects (LME) model as a flexible general framework for simultaneously modeling continuous repeated measures data with a scientifically defensible function that adequately summarizes both individual change as well as the average response. The module…

A small group of interested upper secondary education students participated in a workshop where they created a particle-based physics engine and used the engine to implement a hanging cloth simulation and a two-dimensional heat diffusion model of their own creation. During the implementation of their models, learning opportunities present…

The aim of this research is to determine the effects of Scratch and Alice tools and programming teaching practices on student engagement, reflective thinking and problem-solving skills and computational thinking (CT) comparatively. A quasi-experimental design was used in the research and patterns with pretest-posttest control group were chosen for…

This study investigated young children's computational thinking (CT) development by integrating ScratchJr into a programming curriculum. Twelve third graders (six males and six females) voluntarily participated in an experiment-based computer class conducted at a public elementary school in Taiwan. This study adopted a case study methodology to…

In this study, the aim is to evaluate the problem-solving processes in the understanding of problems and to determine and provide strategies, demonstration, expression and problem-writing dimensions in a numerical analysis course for engineering students. The quantitative data and qualitative data were interpreted using exploratory sequential…

This design case discusses the complex collaborative design reasoning processes involved in developing an online interactive learning tool for learners of all ages to explore and understand the role of flagellate plants in our society. The learning tool consists of a main website (the "Voyager") and an interactive, dynamic map of the…

In our age of big data and growing computational power, versatility in data analysis is important. This study presents a flexible way to combine statistics and machine learning for data analysis of a large-scale educational survey. The authors used statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students' attitudes towards information…

In higher education, a limited number of studies have been conducted on the relationship between lifestyle and creativity and dating back to more than 50 years ago. This study investigates the up-to-date results of the relationship between university students' lifestyles and their creative ideation. The data was collected two times in order to…