We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services and the standard Hadoop API. Using the standard API, students directly experienced the quality of industrial big-data tools. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware,…

This article brings together, summarizes, and comments on several threads of research that have contributed to our understanding of the challenges that novice programmers face when learning about the runtime dynamics of programs and the role of the computer in program execution. More specifically, the review covers the literature on programming…

Cooperative learning is a well-known instructional technique that has been applied with a wide variety of subject matter and a broad spectrum of populations. This article briefly reviews the principles of cooperative learning, and describes how these principles were incorporated into a comprehensive set of cooperative learning activities for a CS1…

This article is a survey of program visualization systems intended for teaching beginners about the runtime behavior of computer programs. Our focus is on generic systems that are capable of illustrating many kinds of programs and behaviors. We inclusively describe such systems from the last three decades and review findings from their empirical…

We present the results of an interview study investigating student experiences in two online introductory computer science courses. Our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection of two research traditions: "distance and adult education research," which tends to be sociologically oriented, and "computer science education research," which…

One of the goals of using robots in introductory programming courses is to increase motivation among learners. There have been several types of robots that have been used extensively in the classroom to teach a variety of computer science concepts. A more recently introduced robot designed to teach programming to novice students is the Institute…

Example programs play an important role in the teaching and learning of programming. Students as well as teachers rank examples as the most important resources for learning to program. Example programs work as role models and must therefore always be consistent with the principles and rules we are teaching. However, it is difficult to find or…

It has been estimated that more than two million students started computing studies in 1999 and 650,000 of them either dropped or failed their first programming course. For the individual student, dropping such a course can distract from the completion of later courses in a computing curriculum and may even result in changing their course of study…

Our approach to teaching introductory artificial intelligence (AI) unifies its diverse core topics through a theme of machine learning, and emphasizes how AI relates more broadly with computer science. Our work, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, involves the development, implementation, and testing of a suite of projects that…

A concept inventory is a standardized assessment tool intended to evaluate a student's understanding of the core concepts of a topic. In order to create a concept inventory it is necessary to accurately identify these core concepts. A Delphi process is a structured multi-step process that uses a group of experts to achieve a consensus opinion. We…

This article reports on an experiment undertaken in order to evaluate the effect of a program visualization tool for helping students to better understand the dynamics of object-oriented programs. The concrete tool used was BlueJ's debugger and object inspector. The study was done as a control-group experiment in an introductory programming…

Programming is recognized as one of seven grand challenges in computing education. Decades of research have shown that the major problems novices experience are composition-based---they may know what the individual programming language constructs are, but they do not know how to put them together. Despite this fact, textbooks, educational…