Python is gaining popularity in academia as the preferred language to teach novices serial programming. The syntax of Python is clean, easy, and simple to understand. At the same time, it is a high-level programming language that supports multi programming paradigms such as imperative, functional, and object-oriented. Therefore, by default, it is…

Coding education has been offered to primary school students due to certain reasons: (1) coding improves students' problem solving and creative thinking skills; and (2) it has high visual-quality and easy-to-use block-based tools. In this study, the effects of coding education on 4th grade students' self-efficacy and scratch coding achievement…

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…

Serious games, or else educational games, for programming are considered to have a positive impact on learning programming. Specifically, serious games are considered to motivate students and engage them in playing and learning programming. However, more research is required in order to study their effects in learning programming, as well as their…

In the school year 2020-2021, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed distance learning (in Italian, the DAD acronym is used). Therefore, the Degree Course in Primary Education Sciences of the University of Perugia has proposed an innovative programme for the training of future teachers by developing a distance learning laboratory focusing coding and…

Students learn many concepts in the introductory statistics course, but even our most successful students end up with rigid, ritualized knowledge that does not transfer easily to new situations. In this article we describe our attempt to apply theories and findings from learning science to the design of a statistics course that aims to help…

R and Python are commonly used software languages for data analytics. Using these languages as the course software for the introductory course gives students practical skills for applying statistical concepts to data analysis. However, the reliance upon the command line is perceived by the typical nontechnical introductory student as sufficiently…

The assessment of program functionality can generally be accomplished with straight-forward unit tests. However, assessing the design quality of a program is a much more difficult and nuanced problem. Design quality is an important consideration since it affects the readability and maintainability of programs. Assessing design quality and giving…

In our age of big data and growing computational power, versatility in data analysis is important. This study presents a flexible way to combine statistics and machine learning for data analysis of a large-scale educational survey. The authors used statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students' attitudes towards information…

In higher education, a limited number of studies have been conducted on the relationship between lifestyle and creativity and dating back to more than 50 years ago. This study investigates the up-to-date results of the relationship between university students' lifestyles and their creative ideation. The data was collected two times in order to…

The general growth in public affairs programs offering hybrid and online courses to reach a wide variety of students, along with the necessity of doing so during a global health pandemic, calls for an investigation of best practices in teaching public affairs statistics and research-oriented courses. These courses often require the use of a…

Causal inference regarding a hypothesized mediation mechanism relies on the assumptions that there are no omitted pretreatment confounders (i.e., confounders preceding the treatment) of the treatment-mediator, treatment-outcome, and mediator-outcome relationships, and there are no posttreatment confounders (i.e., confounders affected by the…

Students completing undergraduate majors in chemistry are not typically required to undergo formal training in computer programming or coding. As a result, many chemistry students are graduating without skills in understanding, writing, or manipulating computer code. This skills gap places students at a disadvantage, considering the widespread and…

Due the wideness of the term Physical Computing, there is a need for a better structure of this topic. This paper is about an approach of structuring this field by finding attributes of different physical computing devices which can be used in class. Those attributes are meant to enforce teachers as well as researchers to analyze different devices…

The use of Scratch programming in introducing text-based programming to novices at all levels of education has gained prominence in computer science but is still hardly known among pre-service teachers. With affordances of Scratch in learning text-based programming, we present an experience report on how we supported our first-year pre-service…