A common belief among students is that computing is a boring subject that lacks a connection to the real world. The first class (one 80-minute session) in an introductory computer science course may be an appropriate instance to combat such a belief. Previous studies have used course-wide interventions, e.g., games and physical/tangible devices to…

Active and collaborative learning has shown considerable promise for improving student outcomes and reducing group disparities. As one common form of collaborative learning, pair programming is an adapted work practice implemented widely in higher education computing programs. In the classroom setting, it typically involves two computer science…

Computer science students often evaluate the behavior of the code they write by running it on specific inputs and studying the outputs, and then apply their comprehension to a more general understanding of the code. While this is a good starting point in the student's career, successful graduates must be able to reason analytically about the code…

Contribution: A systematic literature review on the empirical evidence regarding the usage of programming languages for learning purposes is presented. The review analyzes different methods and tools at different educational levels and with different objectives. Background: Learning programming has gained relevance in the last decade. This is due…

Background and Context: Educators make consequential curricular decisions, often with little support, particularly as it relates to equity and how to support all students. Objective: This paper investigates the use of a rubric to support educators evaluating computer science curricula, especially with regards to equity. Method: Seventeen…

Understanding the processes in education, such as the student learning behavior within a specific course, is a key to continuous course improvement. In online learning systems, students' learning can be tracked and examined based on data collected by the systems themselves. However, it is non-trivial to decide how to extract the desired students'…

The purpose of this study was to identify international trends in K-12 computer science curricula in countries that have introduced computer science education. Content analysis method was used to analyse the country-wide curricula of 10 countries which have introduced computer science education at the primary level. The K-12 Computer Science…

Cooperative learning manifests itself as pair programming in coding education. There is a limited number of studies experimentally demonstrating that pair programming is effective in the educational context. Therefore, in this study, solo and pair programming were compared in terms of flow experience, coding quality, and coding achievement. The…

In education, we have noticed a significant gap between the ability of students to program in an educational visual programming environment and the ability to write code in a professional programming environment. The aim of our research was to verify the methodology of transition from visual programming of mobile applications in MIT App Inventor 2…

Sentiment analysis (SA) is the process of identifying and classifying users' opinion from a piece of text into different sentiments. Student's evaluation of teaching is one of the common and necessary measures to assess the teaching quality of course instructors in a college setting. Traditionally, student evaluations are administered towards the…

This research seeks to introduce concepts for programming, a key element of computing, to K-12 students. A central goal is to better understand the benefits of concept-integrated game mechanics in teaching basic programming concepts. The context of this research is also one of broadening participation. Thus the studies have been conducted in…

Evaluating a software design is an important practice of expert software designers. They spend significant time evaluating their solution, by developing an integrated mental model of the software design and the requirements. However, sufficient emphasis has not been given on teaching and learning of evaluation practices in software design courses,…

As a dynamic and multifaceted construct, computational thinking (CT) has proven to be challenging to conceptualize and assess, which impedes the development of a workable ontology framework. To address this issue, the current article describes a novel approach towards understanding the ontological aspects of CT by using text mining and…

Integrating computational thinking into K-12 Education has been a widely explored topic in recent years. Particularly, effective assessment of computational thinking can support the understanding of how learners develop computational concepts and practices. Aiming to help advance research on this topic, we propose a data-driven approach to assess…

Digital technologies are an integral facet of human existence, changing how humans find information, the way humans communicate and even human behavior. This transition applies to education as well, with the continued growth of artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping the higher education landscape at two- and four-year institutions alike. AI is…