In Computer Science (CS) education, understanding factors contributing to students' programming difficulties is crucial for effective learning support. By identifying specific issues students face, educators can provide targeted assistance to help them overcome obstacles and improve learning outcomes. While identifying sources of struggle, such as…

Design patterns for learning are about articulating, testing and sharing the principles of problem solving in the educational context. In this way, multiple patterns are developed to solve common problems, described in various pattern language formats. Therefore, this work is about characterizing and establishing functional relationships between…

Code quality is a critical aspect of programming, as high-quality code is easier to maintain, and code maintenance constitutes the majority of software costs. Consequently, code quality should be emphasized in programming education. While previous research has identified numerous code quality defects commonly made by students, the current state…

"Stochastic programs," which are programs that produce probabilistic output, are a pivotal paradigm in various areas of CS education from introductory programming to machine learning and data science. Despite their importance, the problem of automatically grading such programs remains surprisingly unexplored. In this paper, we formalize…

Background and Context: Gender research shows that women are better at reading comprehension. Other studies indicate a lower tendency in women to choose STEM professions. Since data modeling requires reading skills and also belongs in the areas of information systems and computer science (STEM professions), these findings provoked our curiosity.…

The value of an instructor is that she exactly recognizes what the learner is struggling with and provides constructive feedback straight to the point. This work aims at a step towards this type of feedback in the context of an introductory programming course, where students perform program execution tracing to align their understanding of Java…

Theories on learning show that formative feedback that is immediate, specific, corrective, and positive is essential to improve novice students' motivation and learning. However, most prior work on programming feedback focuses on highlighting student's mistakes, or detecting failed test cases after they submit a solution. In this article, we…

In this paper the "Memory Transfer Language" program visualization (MTL PV) technique is combined with "constructivism" ("conceptual contraposition and colloquy") and "reversibility" to evolve a new approach for instructional design for teaching and learning introductory programming. A sample of 1,364…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Background: Students make many errors in visual programming. In order to learn from these, it is important that students regulate their emotions and view errors as learning opportunities. Aims: This study aimed to explore to what extent momentary emotions, specifically enjoyment, anxiety and boredom, as well as the error learning orientation of…

Block programming has been suggested as a way of engaging young learners with the foundations of programming and computational thinking in a syntax-free manner. Indeed, syntax errors--which form one of two broad categories of errors in programming, the other one being logic errors--are omitted while block programming. However, this does not mean…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

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…

This research investigated how the bug tracker database of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle is developed as an application of crowd work. The bug tracker is used by software developers, who write and maintain Moodle's code, but also by a wider public world of ordinary Moodle users who can report bugs. Despite many studies of the…

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…