In this article, we discuss the possible connection between the programming language and the paradigm behind it, and programmers' tendency to adopt an external or internal perspective of the system they develop. Based on a qualitative analysis, we found that when working with the visual, interobject language of live sequence charts (LSC),…

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies 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…

POGIL has been successfully implemented in a scientific computing course to teach science students how to program in Python. Following POGIL guidelines, the authors have developed guided inquiry activities that lead student teams to discover and understand programming concepts. With each iteration of the scientific computing course, the authors…

Students in all areas of computing require knowledge of the computing device including software implementation at the machine level. Several courses in computer science curricula address these low-level details such as computer architecture and assembly languages. For such courses, there are advantages to studying real architectures instead of…

This article reports on difficulties related to the concepts of inheritance and polymorphism, expressed by a group of 22 in-service CS teachers with an experience with the procedural paradigm, as they coped with a course on OOP. Our findings are based on the analysis of tests, questionnaires that the teachers completed in the course, as well as on…

Rich, interactive eLearning tools receive a lot of attention nowadays from both practitioners and researchers. However, broader dissemination of these tools is hindered by the technical difficulties of their integration into existing platforms. This article explores the technical and conceptual problems of using several interactive educational…

This article proposes a VHDL language course that establishes a strong correlation between the language statements and their use in circuit synthesis. Two course modules are described: a basic module that contains the essential concepts of the language, sufficient for students to describe medium complexity circuits, followed by a second module…

Greenfoot is an educational integrated development environment aimed at learning and teaching programming. It is aimed at a target audience of students from about 14 years old upwards, and is also suitable for college- and university-level education. Greenfoot combines graphical, interactive output with programming in Java, a standard, text-based…

Scratch is a visual programming environment that allows users (primarily ages 8 to 16) to learn computer programming while working on personally meaningful projects such as animated stories and games. A key design goal of Scratch is to support self-directed learning through tinkering and collaboration with peers. This article explores how the…

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…

Online learning material that students use by themselves is one of the typical usages of algorithm animation (AA). Thus, the integration of algorithm animations into hypertext is seen as an important topic today to promote the usage of algorithm animation in teaching. This article presents an algorithm animation viewer implemented purely using…

jGRASP has three integrated approaches for interacting with its dynamic viewers for data structures: debugger, workbench, and text-based interactions that allow individual Java statements and expressions to be executed/evaluated. These approaches can be used together to provide a complementary set of interactions with the dynamic viewers. Data…

PatternCoder is a software tool to aid student understanding of class associations. It has a wizard-based interface which allows students to select an appropriate binary class association or design pattern for a given problem. Java code is then generated which allows students to explore the way in which the class associations are implemented in a…