Block-based programming languages (BBLs) have been proposed as a way to prepare students for learning to program in more sophisticated, text-based languages, such as Java. Hybrid BBLs add the ability to view and edit the block commands in auto-generated, text-based code. We compared the use of a non-hybrid BBL (Scratch), a hybrid BBL (Pencil…

As open-access institutions serving diverse student populations, community colleges are perfect settings for broadening participation in computing efforts in higher education. The very nature of open access, however, places students with a wide variety of previous experience in the same introductory computer science classroom, intimidating the…

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…

Practical educational assessment tools for adolescents champion student voice, use technology to enhance engagement, highlight discrepancies in school experience, and provide actionable feedback. We report a series of studies that detail an iterative process for developing a new school climate assessment tool: (1) item generation that centres…

Background and Context: Non-traditional training grounds such as coding boot camps that attract a higher proportion of women are important sites for understanding how to broaden participation in computing. Objective: This work aims to help us better understand the women choosing boot camps and their pathways through these camps and into the…

Background and Context: Pair programming is used in classrooms to promote learning and engage a more diverse group of students in computing fields, but little is known about what it looks like in middle school. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine how programming pairs were interacting and about what. Method: Video, audio, and screen…

We developed the Draw-A-Computer-Scientist-Test (DACST) to better understand elementary school students' conceptions of computer scientists and the nature of their work. By understanding how young children perceive computer scientists, we can broaden their ideas about the activities and images of computer scientists. We administered the DACST to…

Community colleges (CC) are obvious places to recruit more women into computer science. Enrollment at CCs has grown in response to a struggling economy, and students are more likely to be from underrepresented groups than students enrolled in 4-year universities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008). However, we know little about why so…

"WeBWorK," an online homework system, can be be used to deliver daily reading questions to students. The author studied its use for this purpose with a lower division Introduction to Programming course and an upper division Probability and Statistics course. In the lower division course, "WeBWorK" significantly improved peer…

Efforts to increase the number of women who pursue and complete advanced degrees in computer and information sciences (CIS) have been limited, in part, by a lack of research on pathways into and out of community college CIS classes. This longitudinal study tests three widely held beliefs about how to increase the number of CIS majors at 4-year…

Incorporating programmable logic devices (PLD) in digital design courses has become increasingly popular. The advantages of using PLDs, such as complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), have been discussed before. However, previous studies have focused on the experiences from the point of view of the…

As part of the research carried out at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), the Paper Authentication and Integrity Research (PAIR) project was launched. We began by investigating how one recent technology affected student learning outcomes. One aspect of this research was to study the…