Teaching programming is a complex task. The task is even more challenging for introductory modules. There is an ongoing debate in the teaching community over the best approach to teaching introductory programming. Visual block-based programming environments allow school students to create their own programs in ways that are more accessible than in…

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…

Throughout the 1990s, Richard Reid of Michigan State University maintained a list showing the first programming language used in introductory programming courses taken by computer science and information systems majors; it was updated for several years afterwards with the most recent update done in 2011. This is a follow-up to that last update of…

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For…

This article explores the role of play in human interaction with computers in the context of computer programming. The author considers many facets of programming including the literary practice of coding, the abstract design of programs, and more mundane activities such as testing, debugging, and hacking. She discusses how these incorporate the…

We highlight ways to support interest-driven creation of digital media in Scratch, a visual-based programming language and community, within a high school programming workshop. We describe a collaborative approach, the programmers' collective, that builds on social models found in do-it-yourself and open source communities, but with scaffolding…

Remote robotics laboratories have been successfully used for engineering education. However, few of them use mobile robots to to teach computer science. This article describes a mobile robot Control and Programming Environment (CPE) and its pedagogical applications. The system comprises a remote laboratory for robotics, an online programming tool,…

Stepwise program refinement techniques can be used to simplify program verification. Programs are better understood since their main properties are clearly stated, and verification of rather complex algorithms is reduced to proving simple statements connecting successive program specifications. Additionally, it is easy to analyse similar…

Computer science programs are too often identified with a narrow stratum of the student population, often white or Asian boys who have access to computers at home. But because computers play such a huge role in our world today, all students can benefit from the study of computer science and the opportunity to build skills related to computing. The…

This study explores students' cognitive processes while debugging programs by using an eye tracker. Students' eye movements during debugging were recorded by an eye tracker to investigate whether and how high- and low-performance students act differently during debugging. Thirty-eight computer science undergraduates were asked to debug two C…

This study evaluates two content delivery options for teaching a programming language to determine whether an asynchronous format can achieve the same learning efficacy as a traditional lecture (face-to-face) format. We use media synchronicity theory as a guide to choose media capabilities to incorporate into an asynchronous tutorial used…

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the missing "T" of technology and "E" of engineering in early childhood STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) curricula. Robotics offers a playful and tangible way for children to engage with both T and E concepts during their foundational early childhood…

Peer learning or, as commonly expressed, peer-assisted learning (PAL) involves school students who actively assist others to learn and in turn benefit from an effective learning environment. This research was designed to support students in becoming more autonomous in their learning, help them enhance their confidence level in tackling computer…

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…

In order to be well-educated citizens in the 21st century, children need to learn computing in school. However, implementing computing education in schools faces several practical problems, such as a lack of computing teachers and time in an already overloaded curriculum. A solution may be a multidisciplinary approach, integrating computing…