Background and Context: Multiple studies report that experienced instructors lack consensus on the difficulty of programming tasks for novices. However, adequately gauging task difficulty is needed for alignment: to select and structure tasks in order to assess what students can and cannot do. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine…

Background: Being easy to learn and fun, block-based programming tools are widely used to teach students introductory programming. Scratch and LEGO robots are two popular block-based programming tools. However, the objects they manipulate are completely different. Scratch manipulates graphical virtual sprites, whereas LEGO robots manipulate…

Aim/Purpose: The need for this paper arises from the lack of comprehensive studies comparing the impact of cloud-based versus local database systems on student learning outcomes. Specifically, there is a need to understand how these different approaches affect usability and cognitive load in educational settings, which are critical factors for…

Flipped classroom is one of the important teaching modes among many novel teaching methods in recent years, students watch the video in the pre-class. However, if students cannot focus on the pre-class video learning or have problems with the learning content, the learning effect will be less than expected. Therefore, this research proposes a…

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners' computational thinking. Design/methodology/approach: By…

This research examines the effect of having a tracking technology in a learning management system (LMS) that reports the effect of perceiving other students' interactions on a learner's intention to keep using LMS in the future. The main underlying theory is herd behaviour theory which argues that crowd behaviour affects the perceptions of the…

This paper describes a pilot study that explores students learning how to program via a multi-disciplinary approach. The study participants were eleven 6th grade students who learned programming fundamentals via music activities in a Scratch 3.0 environment. These activities included the programming of familiar melodies and the development of…

Purpose: Software training is a new trend in software applications. A key problem with software training is that video tutorials are developed without considering the target audience. Although video tutorials are popular, little attention is given to their design features. This study aims to investigate how two multimedia research principles,…

This study aims to explore how gamification elements influence the development of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) in an online project-based programming course conducted on Facebook. We formed student groups by using a quasi-experimental design from students studying in the computer science department. While both courses were project-based, the…

Given the rapid rise of open educational resources (OER) for informal learning pursuits impacting countless millions of people each day around the world, this study investigated the impact of the initiative that spearheaded this movement; namely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) open courseware (OCW). More specifically, it explored…

This paper explores student emotion and learning experiences fostered by lecturing-style instruction in Real-Analysis problem-centered lessons. We focus on two lessons that were taught by two reputable instructors and involved challenging, mathematically-related problems the students did not understand. Nonetheless, one lesson evoked negative…

Purpose: This study aims to examine if a pedagogical agent's expressed anger, when framed as a feedback cue, can enhance mental effort and learning performance in a multimedia learning environment than expressed happiness. Design/methodology/approach: A between-subjects experiment was conducted in which learners engaged with a multimedia learning…

The mass shift to Open-Book, Open-Web (OBOW) assessments during the pandemic highlighted new opportunities in Higher Education for developing accessible, authentic assessments that can reduce administrative load. Despite a plethora of research emerging on the effectiveness of OBOW assessments within disciplines, few currently evaluate their…

Background and Context: Women are underrepresented in the field of computer science, a trend that in part can be traced to girls' early experiences with the discipline. Objective: Our aim is to show how three girls who became strong coders talked about their debugging practice at the intersection of problem solving, emotion, and identity. Method:…