Computer science can be included in Early Childhood Education (ECE) through the use of block-based coding and robots. But this requires adequate preparation of ECE teachers to work with coding and robots, and integrate such into high quality lesson plans. In this paper, we investigate predictors of lesson plan quality among preservice, early…

The Digital Agenda for Europe (2015) states that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for Information and Communications Technology by 2020. This lack of IT professionals stems from the small number of students graduating in computer science. To retain more students in the field, teachers can use remote robotic experiments to explain difficult…

Open learning (OL) strives to transform teaching and learning by applying learning science and emerging technologies to increase student success, improve learning productivity, and lower barriers to access. OL of robotics has a significant growth rate in secondary and/or high schools, but failures exist. Little is known about why many users stop…

Contextualized learning is considered beneficial for student success. In this article, we assess the impact of context-based learning tools on student grade performance in an introductory computer science course. In particular, we investigate two central questions: (1) does the use context-based learning tools, robots and animations, affect…