STEM fields, such as physics, increasingly rely on complex programs to analyse large datasets, thus teaching students the required programming skills is an important component of all STEM curricula. Since undergraduate students often have no prior coding experience, they are reliant on error messages as the primary diagnostic tool to identify and…

Despite the importance of computer science education and computational thinking, there have been limited examples of computer science education at K-12 classrooms that authentically represents the work of computer scientists, especially programming. One reason is the lack of a measurable definition of computational thinking and a programming…

Dimensionality reduction techniques are essential in analyzing large 'omics' datasets in biochemistry and molecular biology. Principal component analysis, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, and uniform manifold approximation and projection are commonly used for data visualization. However, these methods can be challenging for students…

Scientific modeling and coding are critical skills to be integrated into K-12 instruction. Research has shown that preservice teachers are often ill-prepared for teaching scientific modeling, and lack opportunities to learn coding within teacher education programs. The present study reports the implementation of an instructional module and online…

High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science classroom or about how to help students overcome these challenges. This case study explores these challenges…

There is an increasing need for research chemists and biochemists to have a basic familiarity with computer programming. Adding programming content to already crowded STEM undergraduate curricula, however, can be challenging. When programming content is introduced within the chemistry curriculum, it is most often incorporated into upper division…

We introduce two new software tools, Bongojontro and Bongojontro Baksobandi, aimed at reducing the barriers to programming for native speakers of Bengali, the fifth most spoken language in the world. The highlights of these software include programming in the native language of Bengali, simpler construction of programs which is friendly for…

Computational thinking (CT) and modeling are authentic practices that scientists and engineers use frequently in their daily work. Advances in computing technologies have further emphasized the centrality of modeling in science by making computationally enabled model use and construction more accessible to scientists. As such, it is important for…

This study examined the influence of active learning method on students' achievements in and attitudes towards simple electric circuits within the scope of the course of physics. The active learning method allows students to structure the information themselves by doing and experiencing. The study was carried out with 28 students from the…

We present our outreach program, the "Thailand-UK Python+Astronomy Summer School" (ThaiPASS), a collaborative project comprising UK and Thai institutions and assess its impact and possible application to schools in the United Kingdom. Since its inception in 2018, the annual ThaiPASS has trained around 60 Thai high-school students in…

An increasing number of introductory physics courses are seeking to incorporate "authentic practices," and a large area of focus in this trend is the incorporation of computational problems into the curriculum. These problems offer students an opportunity to engage with the programming practices and numerical problem-solving methods used…

Individual based models (IBMs) are up-to-date tools both in research and educational areas. Here we introduce an IBM built on NetLogo platform that simulates a top-down trophic cascade controlled by the pressure exerted by two model predators (web-building spiders and ground runner spiders) on a model pest (the olive fruit fly) within a…

This paper analyzed Scratch projects developed by undergraduate students. The sample consisted of 22 child development students (18 women and four men) in the 2018-2019 academic year. The study adopted an action research design within the scope of a course titled "Teaching Science and Mathematics in Preschool Education." The research was…

In the digital world, where robotics implementations are taking a place in educational processes with increasing acceleration, it is important that pre-service teachers gain competences in this field that addresses the needs of the future. From this point of view, the aim of this study is to design an activity process in which pre-service science…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…