The COVID-19 pandemic and advances in technology have resulted in the emergence of online learning as a new trend in the educational sector. However, during online learning, if students cannot seek immediate assistance from teachers, the use of suitable teaching models and easy-to-understand teaching materials is crucial. To address problems…

Middle school students often enter Computer Science (CS) classes without previous CS or Computational Thinking (CT) instruction. This study evaluated how Code.org's block-based programming curriculum affects middle school students' CT skills and attitudes toward CT and CS. Sixteen students participated in the study. This was a mixed methods action…

In recent years, learning programming has been a challenge for both learners and educators. How to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes has been a significant concern for researchers. This study examines the effects of AI-based pedagogical agents on students' learning experiences in programming courses, focusing on web game development…

The integration of digital technology into various sectors has transformed education globally, yet its adoption in Nigeria remains constrained by a lack of adequately trained personnel. This study addresses this gap by developing a Project-Based Arduino Robot Application (PARA) for teaching Robotics Programming to preservice teachers. A Research…

Introductory programming courses (CS1) are difficult for novices. Inspired by "Problem solving followed by instruction" and "Productive Failure" approaches, we define an original "necessity-driven" learning design. Students are put in an apparently well-known situation, but this time they miss an essential ingredient…

It is widely recognized that debugging is challenging for novice programmers and, as such, computing educators and researchers have called for explicit debugging instruction. Debugging requires various knowledge and skills, and different students may show different strengths and weaknesses. An understanding of such individual differences is…

Game based-learning have been widely promoted to overcome the difficulties encountered by beginners to learn programming. However, there are many issues to address for the implementation of game-based learning. Indeed, game-based learning is not limited to adding game elements such as rewards to a learning situation, but it rather consists of…

Computational thinking is believed to be beneficial for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning as it is closely related to many other skills required by STEM disciplines. There has been an increasing interest in integrating computational thinking into STEM and many studies have been conducted to examine the effects of…

Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, most of these tools only measure the similarity between assignment submissions, and do not actually identify which are suspicious of plagiarism. This work…

Background: Socially shared regulation is a vital factor that affects students' collaborative programming performance. However, students' weak group metacognitive skills or inability to adopt shared regulation mechanisms lead to unsatisfactory collaborative programming learning. Objectives: This study proposes an approach to support socially…

Teaching programming and computational thinking to young students has gained increasing attention in recent years. This great attention is attributed partially to the emergence of easy-to-use visual programming environments. These environments help students focus on the logic and concepts of programming and at the same time enhance their…

Although generalizability theory (GT) designs have traditionally been analyzed within an ANOVA framework, identical results can be obtained with structural equation models (SEMs) but extended to represent multiple sources of both systematic and measurement error variance, include estimation methods less likely to produce negative variance…

The STEM acronym (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has evolved into STEAM, to reflect the increasingly held view that art and creativity are essential components of math/science teaching and learning. Sadly, too few students are choosing to take computer science classes. When presented as a technical science, many students,…

This learning activity describes changes made to teach Recreation Programming in an online format, specifically the use of weekly student-led discussions on readings and films related to programming. The three components of weekly discussions (weekly summaries, weekly participation, and one-time discussion leader) are explained.

Negative attitudes and perceptions on programming impair the effectiveness of learning programming skills. In this study the attitude related to programming, problem solving, and self-views on importance of IT/programming knowledge were assessed by pre- and post-test completed at the beginning and at the end of a software development course. The…