This study aimed to determine undergraduate and associate degree students' computer programming attitude and self-efficacy levels, and compare them according to thinking style, gender, department, weekly study time, and programming experience variables. The study employed the correlational research model. The researcher attempted to reach all…

Computational Thinking (CT) is pervasive in our daily lives and is useful for problem-solving. Decision-making is a crucial part of problem-solving. In the extant literature, problem-solving strategies in educational settings are often conveniently attributed to intuition; however, it is well documented that computer programmers might even have…

The central role of motivation to learn in distance education has been noted, and gamification has been proposed as one approach to promote student motivation. This study explores promoting motivation in a distance education, third-year computer programming course via a gamified approach to improve coursework participation and student experience.…

This paper reflects on recent projects in a variety of media forms, in both formal and informal educational settings, discussing ways of expanding our notions of literacy practices which reflect their place in the wider lived experience of digital culture. We have collected these reflections under three headings. The first of these, Dynamic…

Educational robotics programs offer an engaging opportunity to potentially teach core computer science concepts and practices in K-12 classrooms. Here, we test the effects of units with different programming content within a virtual robotics context on both learning gains and motivational changes in middle school (6th-8th grade) robotics…

Children and adolescents are exposed to a huge variety of communication channels. In this study, we examined the relationship between medium preference and content consumed, and the factors of preference by Israeli children and adolescents, with reference to socio-demographic characteristics. This is a quantitative, mixed-method study with a…

Computer games are quickly gaining momentum by enabling new approaches to teaching and learning experience for programming courses in K-12 curriculum. However, it remains unclear if the game interface and elements created by using three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds combined with visual programming languages or a visual programming environment…

Within the context of Rogers theory of perceived attributes, authors propose a framework that can predict students' motivation to adopt programming contest like ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). In this paper we investigate the attributes for adoption of programming contest in a social…

The Computational Thinking recently has been recognised as one of the basic knowledge to be developed since childhood. Coding and computers are not just programming, but tools that help students to develop problem solving skills and more deep understand of the way things work. For these reasons, great attention has been focused on this topic both…

The first obstacles to overcome when a student has to face the task of programming for the first time are the abstraction level, the comprehension of a language with unfamiliar concepts for him/her and the specific syntax for each programming language. This work presents the qualitative results obtained in a study focused on the gain of skills for…

Data Structures and Algorithms are a central part of Computer Science. Due to their abstract and dynamic nature, they are a difficult topic to learn for many students. To alleviate these learning difficulties, instructors have turned to algorithm visualizations (AV) and AV systems. Research has shown that especially engaging AVs can have an impact…

Introduction: Computer scientists and other researchers often make their programs freely available online. If this software makes a valuable contribution inside or outside of academia then its creators may want to demonstrate this with a suitable indicator, such as download counts. Methods: Download counts, citation counts, labels and licenses…

For the past 4 years, we have been involved in a project that aims to enhance the teaching and learning of experimental analysis and statistics, of environmental and biological sciences students, through computational programming activities (using R code). In this project, through an iterative design, we have developed sequences of R-code-based…

Extracting information efficiently from game/simulation-based assessment (G/SBA) logs requires two things: a well-structured log file and a set of analysis methods. In this report, we propose a generic data model specified as an extensible markup language (XML) schema for the log files of G/SBAs. We also propose a set of analysis methods for…

AutoTutor uses conversational intelligent agents in learning environments. One of the major challenges in developing AutoTutor applications is to assess students' natural language answers to AutoTutor questions. We investigated an AutoTutor dataset with 3358 student answers to 49 AutoTutor questions. In comparisons with human ratings, we found…