The following material, adapted from the new IRA book "Getting Beyond "I Like the Book"" (second edition), highlights how podcasting specifically and technology in general can be used as tools for thinking about the world and for learning and communicating.

This study investigates how young children master, construct and understand intelligent rule-based robot behaviors, focusing on their strategies in gradually meeting the tasks' complexity. The wider aim is to provide a comprehensive map of the kinds of transitions and learning that take place in constructing simple emergent behaviors, particularly…

Null distributions of permutation tests for two-sample, paired, and block designs are simulated using the R statistical programming language. For each design and type of data, permutation tests are compared with standard normal-theory and nonparametric tests. These examples (often using real data) provide for classroom discussion use of metrics…

This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs ("House" and "Grey's Anatomy") were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than…

Self-testing is a means to check learning effect. Besides time-space restriction, there are many deficiencies in traditional offline self-testing. With the development of information technology, learners can have self-testing on the Internet. Self-testing on Internet, namely, web-based self-testing, overcomes time-space limitation of traditional…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two different methods on primary school teacher candidates' academic achievements and attitudes toward computer-based education, and to define their views on these methods. Both the first experimental group, programmed instruction (PI), and the second experimental group, meaningful…

Compared to other subjects, the typical introductory programming (CS1) course has higher than usual rates of both failing and high grades, creating a characteristic bimodal grade distribution. In this article, I explore two possible explanations. The conventional explanation has been that learners naturally fall into populations of programmers and…

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming…

This article presents the design and development of i*CATch, a construction kit for physical and wearable computing that was designed to be scalable, plug-and-play, and to provide support for iterative and exploratory learning. It consists of a standardized construction interface that can be adapted for a wide range of soft textiles or electronic…

The acquisition of programming skills specially in introductory programming courses poses an important challenge for freshmen students of engineering programs. These courses require students to devote a sustained effort during the whole course and a failure to do so may contribute to not passing the course. However, it is difficult for the…

The research reported in this article formed part of an internationally funded project about the empowerment of Information Technology (IT) teachers in economically deprived rural schools in the North-West and KwaZulu-Natal provinces in South Africa. The current paper focused on the use of self-directed metacognitive (SDM) questioning in a pair…

Advances in technology have caused high schools to update their computer science curricula; however there has been little analogous attention to technology-related education in middle schools. With respect to computer-related knowledge and skills, middle school students are at a critical phase in life, exploring individualized education options…

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the various ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers experience learning to program in an object-oriented language. Both groups of teachers were enrolled in university courses. In most cases, the pre-service teachers were learning to program for the first time, while the in-service…

We discuss the design, creation and implementation of an instructional game for use in a high school poetry class following a commitment to an educational game design principle of "alignment". We studied groups of instructional designers and an interactive fiction computer game they built. The game was implemented in a 9th grade English classroom…

This article critiques learning design as a representation for sharing and developing practice, based on synthesis of three projects. Starting with the findings of the Mod4L Models of Practice project, it argues that the technical origins of learning design, and the consequent focus on structure and sequence, limit its usefulness for sharing…