Analyzing which skills students develop in introductory programming education is an important question for the computer science education community. These key skills and concepts have been formalized as knowledge components, which are units of knowledge that can be measured by performance on a set of tasks. While knowledge components in other…

Contribution: In this study, an object tuple model has been proposed, and a quasi-experimental study on its usage in an introductory programming language course has been reported. This work can be adopted by all C language teachers and students in learning pointer and array-related concepts. Background: C language has been extensively employed in…

Large Language Model (LLM) artificial intelligence tools present a unique challenge for educators who teach programming languages. While LLMs like ChatGPT have been well documented for their ability to complete exams and create prose, there is a noticeable lack of research into their ability to solve problems using high-level programming…

Background: Conventional reflective learning methodologies in programming education often lack structured guidance and individualised feedback, limiting their pedagogical effectiveness. Whilst computational thinking (CT) offers a systematic problem-solving framework with decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithm design, its…

When incorporating programming into a statistics course, there are many pedagogical considerations. In R, one consideration is the particular R syntax used. This article reports on a head-to-head comparison of a pair of introductory statistics labs, one conducted in the formula syntax, the other in tidyverse. Pre- and post-surveys show minimal…

The purpose of the current study was to explore the effect of modality (constructionist mBlock, Scratch, and Python interventions) on six-grade students' computational thinking, programming attitude, and achievement. The pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental design was used to explore the research questions. The study group consisted of 105…

Scientific programming has become increasingly essential for manipulating, visualizing, and interpreting the large volumes of data acquired in earth science research. Yet few discipline-specific instructional approaches have been documented and assessed for their effectiveness in equipping geoscience undergraduate students with coding skills. Here…

Introduction: Computer Science Education does not have a universally defined set of concepts consistently covered in all introductory courses (CS1). One approach to understanding the concepts covered in CS1 is to ask educators. In 2004, Nell Dale did just this. She also collected their perceptions on challenging topics to teach. Dale mused how the…

The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge…

Data and its applications are increasingly ubiquitous in the rapidly digitizing world and consequently, students across different disciplines face increasing demand to develop skills to answer both academia's and businesses' increasing need to collect, manage, evaluate, apply and extract knowledge from data and critically reflect upon the derived…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT are becoming increasingly common in educational settings, especially in programming education. However, the impact of these tools on the learning process, student performance, and best practices for their integration remains underexplored. This study examines student experiences and…

STEM fields, such as physics, increasingly rely on complex programs to analyse large datasets, thus teaching students the required programming skills is an important component of all STEM curricula. Since undergraduate students often have no prior coding experience, they are reliant on error messages as the primary diagnostic tool to identify and…

Quantitative literacy is necessary to keep pace with the exponentially increasing magnitude of biological data and the complexity of statistical tools. However, statistical programming can cause anxiety in new learners and educators alike. In order to produce graduates that are well-prepared for quantitative research, overcoming the initial…

Instruction in an introductory programming course is typically designed to introduce new concepts and to review and integrate the more recent concepts with what was previously learned in the course. Therefore, most exam questions in an introductory programming course require students to write lines of code that contain syntactic elements…

This study investigated common student errors and underlying difficulties of two groups of Chinese middle school students in an introductory Python programming course using data in the automated assessment tool (AAT) Mulberry. One group of students was from a typical middle school while the other group was from a high-ability middle school. By…