This paper describes a 54-hour summer institute for grades 6-12 mathematics and science teachers (N = 19) with a comprehensive approach to preparing teachers to use computational thinking (CT) in their classrooms, including training in Python computer programming with Lego® Mindstorms® robotics, mathematics content sessions, and opportunities to…

With the expansion of computer science (CS) education, CS teachers in K-12 schools should be cognizant of student misconceptions and be prepared to help students establish accurate understanding of computer science and programming. This exploratory design-based research (DBR) study implemented a data-driven approach to identify secondary school…

US high school (HS) students are lagging behind their foreign peers in math performance. It is thus necessary to design teaching modules that motivate US HS students to learn more math and to improve their math skills. Our study set out to test two different software programs designed for the development of such skills. MATLAB Simulink provides a…

The fundamentals of computer science are increasingly important to consider as critical educational and occupational competencies, as evidenced by the rapid growth of computing capabilities and the proliferation of the Internet in the 21st century, combined with reimagined national education standards. Despite this technological and social…

Today's software industry requires individuals who are proficient in as many programming languages as possible. Structured query language (SQL), as an adopted standard, is no exception, as it is the most widely used query language to retrieve and manipulate data. However, the process of learning SQL turns out to be challenging. The need for a…

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a widely adopted pedagogy that ignites students' interest of a subject through the investigation of an authentic problem and cultivates their abilities of innovation and self-learning. Traditional PBL often involves a project of complexity and significant scale, which, under the time constraint of a course, is often…

Collaborative problem solving in computer-supported environments is of critical importance to the modern workforce. Coworkers or collaborators must be able to co-create and navigate a shared problem space using discourse and non-verbal cues. Analyzing this discourse can give insights into how consensus is reached and can estimate the depth of…

Computational thinking (CT) is a fundamental skill for students, and assessment is a critical factor in education. However, there is a lack of effective approaches to CT assessment. Therefore, we designed the Three-Dimensional Integrated Assessment (TDIA) framework in this article. The TDIA has two aims: one was to integrate three dimensions…

The Scientific Computing for Chemists course taught at Wabash College teaches chemistry students to use the Python programming language, Jupyter notebooks, and a number of common Python scientific libraries to process, analyze, and visualize data. Assuming no prior programming experience, the course introduces students to basic programming and…

The demand for computing professionals in the workplace has led to increased attention to computer science education, and introductory computer science courses have been introduced at different levels of education. This study investigated the relationship between gender, academic performance in non-programming subjects, and programming learning…

Computational thinking (CT) uses concepts that are essential to computing and information science to solve problems, design and evaluate complex systems, and understand human reasoning and behavior. This way of thinking has important implications in computer sciences as well as in almost every other field. Therefore, we contend that CT should be…

Teaching advanced programming can be a challenge, especially when the students are pursuing different majors with diverse analytical and problem-solving capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the efficacy of using a particular problem as a vehicle for imparting a broad set of programming concepts and problem-solving techniques. We…

In an educational environment, instructors would always think of ways to provide students with motivational learning materials and efficient learning strategies. Hence, many researchers have proposed that students' problem-solving ability enhances their learning. Problem-solving ability plays an important role for users in dealing with problems…

According to Dudeney, Hockly, and Pegrum (2013) coding is a deeper skill subsumed under the four main digital literacies of language, connections, information, and (re)design. Coders or programmers are people who write the programmes behind everything we see and do on a computer. Most students spend several hours playing online games, but few know…

As part of curriculum changes in South Africa, an introductory programming language, Scratch, must first be taught before switching to the well-established teaching of Delphi. The nature of programming in Scratch is considerably different from that in Delphi. It was assumed that the teaching of Scratch as introductory programming language could…