Programming demands a variety of cognitive skills, and mastering these competencies is essential for success in computer science education. The importance of formative feedback is well acknowledged in programming education, and thus, a diverse range of techniques has been proposed to generate and enhance formative feedback for programming…

We report the results of a 4800-respondent survey among students at a technical university regarding their usage of artificial intelligence tools, as well as their expectations and attitudes about these tools. We find that many students have come to differentiated and thoughtful views and decisions regarding the use of artificial intelligence. The…

Learning trend has been shifted from a conventional way to a digital way in the form of E-learning, but it faces a high dropout ratio. Lack of engagement is one of the primary factors reported for this issue as the same type of course content is presented to learners despite their different background, knowledge and learning styles. Different…

Teaching programming is a topic that has generated a high level of interest among researchers in recent decades. In particular, multiple approaches to teaching visual programming have been explored, from the use of tools such as Scratch, robots, unplugged programming, or activities for the development of computational thinking. Despite the wide…

In this article, we leverage ideas from the theory of coevolutionary computation to analyze interactions of students with problems. We introduce the idea of "informatively" easy or hard concepts. Our approach is different from more traditional analyses of problem difficulty such as item analysis in the sense that we consider Pareto…

The swift advancement of artificial intelligence, especially large language models (LLMs), has generated novel prospects for improving educational methodologies. Nonetheless, the successful incorporation of these technologies into pedagogical methods, such as flipped classrooms, continues to pose a challenge. This study investigates the…

Regular expressions (REs) are often taught to undergraduate computer science majors in the Formal Languages and Automata (FLA) course; they are widely used to implement different software functionalities such as search mechanisms and data validation in diverse fields. Despite their importance, the difficulty of REs has been asserted many times in…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly exploited to promote student engagement. This study combined topic modelling, keyword analysis, trend test and systematic analysis methodologies to analyse AI-supported student engagement (AIsE) studies regarding research keywords and topics, AI roles, AI systems and algorithms, methods and domains,…

The emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has sparked investigations into their applications in teaching and learning. In computer programming education, efforts are underway to explore how this tool can enhance instructional practices. Despite the growing literature, there is a lack of synthesis on its use in this field. This rapid review…

The rise of online programming education has necessitated more effective personalized interactions, a gap that PythonPal aims to fill through its innovative learning system integrated with a chatbot. This research delves into PythonPal's potential to enhance the online learning experience, especially in contexts with high student-to-teacher ratios…

In this study, we developed a classification system of programming errors based on the historical data of 680,540 programming records collected on the Online Judge platform. The classification system described six types of programming errors (i.e., syntax, logical, type, writing, misunderstanding, and runtime errors) and their connections with…

Intelligent tutoring systems have become increasingly common in assisting students but are often aimed at isolated subject-domain tasks without creating a scaffolding system from lower- to higher-level cognitive skills, with low-level skills often neglected. We designed and developed an intelligent tutoring system, CompPrehension, which aims to…

Online learning systems should support students preparedness for professional practice by equipping them with the necessary skills while keeping them engaged and active. In that regard, the development of online learning systems that support students' development and engagement with programming is a challenging process. Early career computer…

Artificial intelligence (AI) in programming teaching is something that still has to be explored, since in this area assessment tools that allow grading the students work are the most common ones, but there are not many tools aimed toward providing feedback to the students in the process of creating their program. In this work a small sized…

The Question answering (QA) system plays a basic role in the acquisition of information and the e-learning environment is considered to be the field that is most in need of the question-answering system to help learners ask questions in natural language and get answers in short periods of time. The main problem in this context is how to understand…