As Computer Science course enrollments have increased over recent years, instructors have turned to automated grading systems to help relieve the burden of processing student assignments. However, the available autograding solutions have generally lacked support for traditionally difficult-to-grade advanced topics courses. In this thesis, I…

This study investigates the delivery of the "Hour of Code" tutorials to college students. The college students who participated in this study were surveyed about their opinion of the Hour of Code. First, the students' comments were discussed. Next, a content analysis of the offered tutorials highlights their reliance on visual…

Teaching modeling in computer science is complicated. Many factors contribute, and are related in diverse ways. We regard some combinations as more successful than others, but we also value diversity, and we struggle to elucidate the relationships and our value structure. Similar remarks apply to the study of biological ecosystems. This…

This paper reflects on the process of designing and implementing an update to the "Introduction to Information Technology" course at Bentley University, a business university in New England. Driven by a university-wide curriculum reform initiative and following best practices from digital literacy frameworks and IS model curricula, the…

Cheating has been a long-standing issue in university assessments. However, the release of ChatGPT and other free-to-use generative AI tools has provided a new and distinct method for cheating. Students can run many assessment questions through the tool and generate a superficially compelling answer, which may or may not be accurate. We ran a…

This study explored factors impacting the decision for gifted females to pursue a career in computer science. The study used a phenomenological approach to delve into the experiences of ten gifted alumnae of The Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science (Gatton), a residential STEM program, aiming to reveal nuanced insights into factors shaping…

Computer use has become a fact of life, especially for children, many of whom were forced to switch to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and resorted to digital hobbies as a safety measure. Further the amount of time children spend on computers, as well as the number of different computer devices that pervade our post-pandemic society…

The recent integration of visual capabilities into Large Language Models (LLMs) has the potential to play a pivotal role in science and technology education, where visual elements such as diagrams, charts, and tables are commonly used to improve the learning experience. This study investigates the performance of ChatGPT-4 Vision, OpenAI's most…

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

The Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and its partners administered the STEM-CS intervention to support the professional learning of middle and high school STEM teachers in rural southcentral Kentucky counties. The goals of the STEM-CS intervention were to improve teacher STEM-CS knowledge, practice, implementation, and…

While research has shown that students' epistemic beliefs can be a strong predictor of their academic performance, cognitive abilities, or self-efficacy, studies of this topic in computer education are rare. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to validate a newly developed questionnaire for measuring students' epistemic beliefs…

Cultural tourism provides rich opportunities for experiential learning, but a framework to foster such learning is lacking. This study introduces the "learning behaviors-interactive scenarios" framework to explore key facilitators of experiential learning in cultural tourism. Through a literature review, it outlines key learning…

Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics or the institution it is presented in. To better integrate computational thinking in introductory physics, we need to understand what physicists find important about computational thinking in introductory physics. We…

Learning basic programming concepts in computer science-related fields poses a challenge for students, to the extent that it becomes an academic-social problem, resulting in high failure and dropout rates. Proposed solutions to the problem can be found in the literature, such as the development of new programming languages and environments, the…

This paper evaluates the impact of an English and Business Computer Science program in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the world's second-largest French-speaking country after France. The program addresses the gap between academic training and market needs by combining English language proficiency with essential business and computer…