The purpose of this research project was to design, deliver, and informally assess the content and methodology of an introductory online course for the educators of Deaf and Hard of Hearing students (N=20) that focused on the block-based coding language, Scratch. Prior work by The Playful Learning Lab examined various STEM resources and their…

Background: Learning to code is increasingly embedded in secondary and higher education curricula, where solving programming exercises plays an important role in the learning process and in formative and summative assessment. Unfortunately, students admit that copying code from each other is a common practice and teachers indicate they rarely use…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of computer-assisted gamification on the learning motivation of computer programming students. Background: The teaching-learning of computer programming involves challenges that imply using learning environments in which the student is actively involved. Gamification is an…

This study describes the most relevant problems and solutions found in the literature on teaching and learning of object-oriented programming (OOP). The identification of the problem was based on tertiary studies from the IEEE Xplore, Scopus, ACM Digital Library and Science Direct repositories. The problems and solutions identified were ranked…

Over the last 10 years, learning analytics have provided educators with both dashboards and tools to understand student behaviors within specific technological environments. However, there is a lack of work to support educators in making data-informed design decisions when designing a blended course and planning appropriate learning activities. In…

Context: Computing Education Research (CER) is critical to help the computing education community and policy makers support the increasing population of students who need to learn computing skills for future careers. For a community to systematically advance knowledge about a topic, the members must be able to understand published work thoroughly…

A Concept Inventory (CI) is an assessment to measure student conceptual understanding of a particular topic. This article presents the results of a CI for basic data structures (BDSI) that has been previously shown to have strong evidence for validity. The goal of this work is to help researchers or instructors who administer the BDSI in their own…

In Australian universities, mathematics is often an essential core subject for disciplines such as engineering, information technology and science. These first-year mathematics subjects may have large enrolments of which a significant number fail the subject and repeat. While interventions to retain students are common, those who have failed…

With the urgency of adult digital skill development as a backdrop, the Digital Resilience in the American Workforce (DRAW) initiative, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE), conducted a national landscape scan to identify existing resources and effective approaches for digital skills…

Practical programming competencies are critical to the success in computer science (CS) education and go-to-market of fresh graduates. Acquiring the required level of skills is a long journey of discovery, trial and error, and optimization seeking through a broad range of programming activities that learners must perform themselves. It is not…

Network analytics has the potential to examine new behaviour patterns that are often hidden by the complexity of online interactions. One of the varied network analytics approaches and methods, the model of collective attention, takes an ecological system perspective to exploring the dynamic process of participation patterns in online and flexible…

Contribution: This article features a systematic literature review with the objective of presenting a study that reflects the current scenario of research on the cognitive load theory (CLT) in the domain of teaching and learning computer programming. Background: Computer programming is a highly cognitive skill, requiring mastering multiple…

Supporting upward transfer students is critical to diversifying STEM. This study provides insight into how we can best support upward transfer students in computing, one of the least diverse STEM disciplines. Specifically, we expand upon recent research on sense of belonging to examine how the predictors of belonging might be unique for upward…

The interest in computational thinking development at pre-university education stage is increasing. In this study, a meta-analysis was conducted to address two main objectives: (a) to analyze the effectiveness of empirical interventions in K-12 education for the development of Computational Thinking (CT); and (b) to identify and evaluate the…

This study investigated common student errors and underlying difficulties of two groups of Chinese middle school students in an introductory Python programming course using data in the automated assessment tool (AAT) Mulberry. One group of students was from a typical middle school while the other group was from a high-ability middle school. By…