E-textbooks are one of the commonly used sources to learn programming, in the domain of computer science and engineering. Programming related textbooks provide examples related to syntax, but the number of examples are often limited. Thus, beginners who use e-textbooks often visit other sources on the internet for examples and other information.…

Background: Skill integration is vital in students' mastery development and is especially prominent in developing code tracing skills which are foundational to programming, an increasingly important area in the current STEM education. However, instructional design to support skill integration in learning technologies has been limited. Objectives:…

Fostering students' competence in applying interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems has been recognized as an important and challenging issue globally. This is why STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education has been emphasized at all levels in schools. Meanwhile, the use of robotics has played an important role in STEM…

Nowadays, technology has become dominant in the daily lives of most people around the world. Technology is present from children to older people, helping in the most diverse daily tasks and allowing accessibility. However, many times these people are just end-users, without any incentive to develop computational thinking (CT). With advances in…

This study attempts to: (a) investigate whether positive and negative emotions mediate the pathways linking self-efficacy for learning programming with effort and persistence in undergraduates' learning Scratch programming combining with a programmable hardware platform (i.e., Arduino), and (b) assess the effect of academic major (i.e.,…

In the realm of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematic (STEM) education, computer programming stands as a vital discipline, amalgamating cross-disciplinary knowledge and fostering the capacity to solve real-world problems via fundamental concepts and logical methodologies inherent to computer science. Recognizing the important of…

Learning analytics (LA) is a significant field of study to examine and identify difficulties the novice programmers face while learning how to program. Despite producing notable research by the community in the specified area, rare work is observed to synthesize these research efforts and discover the dimensions that guide the future research of…

Individuals learn to develop problem solving strategies and make connections between their mathematical ideas while programming, so they have the opportunity to improve their thinking skills. Scratch provides an environment to experience problem scenarios and encourages them to act out imagination while having fun. The purpose of the study is to…

In recent years, computational thinking (CT) initiatives have been increasing in both research and practice. Although the importance of students' resilience and computational identity in the CT development process is recognized, more research is needed on their role on students' CT skills. Therefore, little is known about whether differences in…

This article presents a multi-stage guided technical project coding Python scripts for utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) to work with a document-store database called DynamoDB. Students doing this project should have taken an introductory programming class (ideally in Python) and a database class to have experience with Python coding and…

Metaphors in gesture and speech play a pivotal role in the way that programming concepts are presented in the classroom. However, little is known about the function of teachers' metaphors in practice. This study aims to explore teachers' use of metaphors in gesture and speech in a lecture on programming. Based on video observations of three upper…

In spring 2022, WestEd conducted a literature review to summarize the major frameworks used in career intentions research and the evidence supporting each framework, as well as to develop an initial set of constructs to guide the development of a brief, culturally sensitive computing career intentions survey measuring individual, situational, and…

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of online problem-based learning (PBL) tasks on problem-solving ability (PSA) and programming skills of secondary school students. A quantitative research design of a quasi-experimental research was adopted in this study. A purposive non-random sampling method was used to select two schools. Then, a…

The process of diffusion is intimately related to random molecular displacement and is central to many problems in chemistry. Here, we provide an intuitive derivation of the diffusion equation based on the analysis of the random trajectories of particles generated and plotted by simple MATLAB and Python scripts. The codes are very simple and…

We argue that understanding the cognitive foundations of computational thinking will assist educators to improve children's learning in computing. We explain the conceptual relationship between executive functions and aspects of computational thinking. We present initial empirical data from 23 eleven year old learners which investigates the…