Secure Code Education (SCE) is the compliance requirement for many organizations in the U.S. Consequently, many U.S. companies spend large sums on programs and tooling to meet this requirement and to upskill their developers. This tooling is largely underutilized. Classes beyond the bare required minimum are often not taken advantage of, leaving…

The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth's book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the 8th graders interpreted the equal sign in the pan balance activities they created on Scratch. Five eighth graders (4 girls and 1 boy) in Turkey participated in this study. Case study was employed as a qualitative research method. Data was gathered through the Scratch files created by the…

In the wake of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, computer programming has become a foundational competency across engineering disciplines. Yet engineering students often resist the notion that computer programming is a skill relevant to their future profession. Here are presented two activities aimed at supporting the early development…

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex, hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating feedback for students. We investigate using LLMs to generate feedback for fixing syntax errors in Python programs, a key scenario in introductory programming. More concretely, given a student's buggy program, our goal is…

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student…

Educators across disciplines are implementing lessons and activities that integrate computing concepts into their curriculum to broaden participation in computing. Out of myriad important introductory computing skills, it is unknown which--and to what extent--these concepts are included in these integrated experiences, especially when compared to…

Debugging is essential for identifying and rectifying errors in programming, yet time constraints and students' trivialization of errors often hinder progress. This study examines differences in debugging challenges and strategies among students with varying computational thinking (CT) competencies using weekly coding journals from an online…

Conversational user interfaces (CUI), including voice interfaces, which allow users to converse with computers via voice, are gaining wide popularity. VoiceBots allow users to receive a response in real-time, regardless of the communication device. VoiceBots have been explored in fields such as customer service to automate repetitive queries and…

Teaching coding and computational thinking is an emerging educational imperative, now embedded in compulsory curriculum in the United States, Finland, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia. This meta-synthesis of 49 studies critically reviews recent international research (2009-2022) of coding and computational…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the forefront in discussions of the future of media and education. Although there are valid concerns, AI has the potential to be useful in learning new skills, particularly those related to computer programming. This case study depicts the ways AI was introduced to assist in teaching coding, specifically in a…

Automated detection of facial emotions has been an interesting topic for multiple decades in social and behavioral research but is only possible very recently. In this tutorial, we review three popular artificial intelligence based emotion detection programs that are accessible to R programmers: Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and…

The increased trend of incorporating computer programming in the basic education system across countries requires the training of new educators. However, the current effort to increase the number of teachers teaching programming is through professional development programs for computer science (CS) teachers and from other content areas. Meanwhile,…

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate code has raised concerns in computer science education, as students may use tools like ChatGPT for programming assignments. While much research has focused on higher education, especially for languages like Java and Python, little attention has been given to K-12 settings, particularly for…

Explain-in-Plain-English (EiPE) questions are used by some researchers and educators to assess code reading skills. EiPE questions require students to briefly explain (in plain English) the purpose of a given piece of code, without restating what the code does line-by-line. The premise is that novices who can explain the purpose of a piece of code…