Generalist primary school computer science (CS) teachers are often reluctant to introduce CS activities that go beyond CS unplugged tasks. To address this challenge, we drew from constructive alignment principles to implement a new programming modality for primary school: the handwriting programming language (HPL). HPL brings programming…

Background: This paper describes research into two pedagogical approaches to foster transdisciplinarity in a graduate engineering course that involves education and computer science. Leveraging the Communities of Practice framework, we examine how students majoring in computer science can integrate new knowledge from education and computer science…

The human aspects of cyber security are fundamental as these are interlinked with processes and technology in building resilience against an evolving and complex threat landscape. It is vital to teach future cyber security specialists sufficient knowledge about human aspects in order to strengthen the defences and defend against malicious actors.…

Background and Context: Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are critical aspect of learning to program and are predictive of academic success. Early college students often struggle to use these skills, but can improve when given targeted instruction. However, it is not yet clear what skills are best to prioritize. Objective: We seek to create a…

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the microlearning instructional approach in an online introductory database programming classroom. The ultimate goal of this study is to inform educators and instructional designers on the design and development of microlearning content that maximizes student learning. Grounded within the…

While there have been many calls for teaching ethics and responsible computing, it is unclear how responsible computing instruction and technical learning interact. Some instructors even hesitate to include ethics in their courses, fearing it might distract students from learning technical computing content. An approach called…

The design of algorithms is one of the hardest topics of high school computer science. This is mainly due to the universality of algorithms as solution methods that guarantee the calculation of a correct solution for all potentially infinitely many instances of an algorithmic problem. The goal of this paper is to present a comprehensible and…

In the wake of the present inclusion of programming in mathematics education, which is a feature of curricular revisions in many countries, we have analysed newly inserted programming activities in mathematics textbooks. The aim was to investigate how such activities relate to and potentially affect students' opportunities to learn mathematics.…

Block-based programming environments have become increasingly commonplace in computer science education. Despite a rapidly expanding ecosystem of block-based programming environments, text-based languages remain the dominant programming paradigm outside of educational contexts, motivating the transition from block-based to text-based programming.…

In the flipped classroom, students engage in preparatory activities to study the course materials prior to attending teacher-guided sessions. Students' success in the flipped classroom is directly related to their preparation and students tend to change their preparation activity over time. Few studies have investigated why students change their…

The aim of research is to reveal the effect of a training program based on the TAWOCK model for teaching computational thinking skills on teaching self-efficacy among computer teachers. It used the quasi-experimental approach, with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. An electronic training program based on the TAWOCK model was…

Query languages are the foundations of database teaching and education practices. The broad adoption of graph databases contrasts with the limited research into how they are taught. Contrary to relational databases, graph databases allow navigational queries with higher expressivity and lack an a priori schema. In this article, we design a…

This paper develops a spreadsheet simulation methodology for teaching simulation and performance analysis of priority queues with multiple servers, without resorting to macros, add-ins, or array formula. The approach is made possible by a "single overtaking" simplifying assumption under which any lower-priority customer may be passed in…

Reflective practice is an essential catalyst through which the benefits of teaching and learning can be reaped. Through it, weaknesses and strengths can be identified in a way that helps raise the level of addressing challenges that may arise as well as overcome them. This paper presents the critical reflective practices among computer science…

Students learning computer science frequently struggle with debugging errors in their code. These struggles can have significant downstream effects--negatively influencing how students assess their programming ability and contributing to their decision to drop out of CS courses. However, debugging instruction is often an overlooked topic, and…