Challenge: The Hodgkin-Huxley membrane conductance model has been featured in biomedical engineering (BME) curricula for decades. A typical BME assignment might require students to apply the relevant equations and parameters to model the generation of action potentials; however, there is opportunity for students to build and explore both…

We propose a framework for identifying, organizing, and communicating learning objectives that involve program semantics. In this framework, detailed learning objectives are written down as rules of program behavior (RPBs). RPBs are teacher-facing statements that describe what needs to be learned about the behavior of a specific sort of programs.…

Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to measure. In this article, we make the journey from defining a formal measure of creativity, that is, efficiently computable to applying the measure in a practical domain. The measure is general and relies on core theoretical concepts in…

Computer programming is a difficult course for many students. Prior works advocated for group learning pedagogies in pursuit of higher-level reasoning and conceptual understanding. However, the methodological gaps in existing implementations warrant further research. This study conducted a three-armed cluster-randomized controlled trial to…

Background: A resurgence in teaching coding in primary school classrooms has led to a pedagogical swing towards using physical computing and coding to develop students' use of algorithms, computational thinking, and problem-solving skills. Two obstacles impede the optimal development of these objectives: the availability of a suitable pedagogy and…

Educational large-scale assessments (LSAs) often provide plausible values for the administered competence tests to facilitate the estimation of population effects. This requires the specification of a background model that is appropriate for the specific research question. Because the "German National Educational Panel Study" (NEPS) is…

The motivation, philosophy, and organization of a course on artificial intelligence in chemical engineering is presented. The purpose is to teach undergraduate and graduate students how to build AI-based models that incorporate a first principles-based understanding of our products, processes, and systems. This is achieved by combining…

As students learn how to program, both their programming code and their understanding of it evolves over time. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach, named "Temporal-ASTNN" for modeling student learning progression in open-ended programming domains. Temporal-ASTNN combines a novel neural network model based on abstract…

Background: This study posits that scaffolded team-based computational modeling and simulation projects can support model-based learning that can result in evidence of representational competence and regulatory skills. The study involved 116 students from a second-year thermodynamics undergraduate course organized into 24 teams, who worked on…

This study examined the effects of worked examples with different explanation types and novices' motivation on cognitive load, and how this subsequently influenced their programming problem-solving performance. Given the study's emphasis on both instructional approaches and learner motivation, the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning served as…

Supporting academically at-risk students has attracted much attention in the field of learning analytics. However, much of the research in this area has focused on developing advanced machine learning models to predict students' academic performance, which alone is insufficient to improve student learning without the implementation of timely…

The work presented in this paper examines part of a broader issue in the field of technology-enhanced learning and focused on Massive Open Online Courses environments (MOOC). The main goal is to provide an approach, models and tools to assist teachers in the scenario design process and the operationalization of pedagogical scenarios in a…

This article reports on a study investigating how computational essays can be used to help students in higher education STEM take up disciplinary epistemic agency--cognitive control and responsibility over one's own learning within the scientific disciplines. Computational essays are a genre of scientific writing that combine live, executable…

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…

This study delves into the integration of Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Computational Thinking (CT) to enhance 21st century learning. Through a Narrative Literature Review (NLR), pivotal strategies for effective implementation are identified. These include fostering collaborative pedagogy, employing visualization tools, embracing diverse…