CODAP is a widely-used programming environment for secondary school data science. Its direct-manipulation-based design offers many advantages to learners, especially younger students. Unfortunately, these same advantages can become a liability when it comes to repeating operations consistently, replaying operations (for reproducibility), and also…

Aim/Purpose: This paper is part of a multi-case study that aims to test whether generative AI makes an effective coding assistant. Particularly, this work evaluates the ability of two AI chatbots (ChatGPT and Bing Chat) to generate concise computer code, considers ethical issues related to generative AI, and offers suggestions for how to improve…

Automatic program repair (APR) tools are valuable for students to assist them with debugging tasks since program repair captures the code modification to make a buggy program pass the given test-suite. However, the process of manually generating catalogs of code modifications is intricate and time-consuming. This article proposes contextual error…

Background and Context: Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, such tools do not identify plagiarism, nor suggest what assignment submissions are suspicious of plagiarism. Source code plagiarism…

Teaching robotics with the robot operating system (ROS) is valuable for instating good programming practices but requires significant setup steps from the learner. Providing a ready-made ROS learning environment over the web can make robotics more accessible; however, most of the previous remote labs have abstracted the authentic ROS developer…

When the new programming language Pascal was developed in the 1970's, Walter Gander did not like it because because many features which he appreciated in prior programming languages were missing in Pascal. For example the block structure was gone, there were no dynamical arrays, no functions or procedures were allowed as parameters of a procedure,…

This study explores student perceptions of learning to code by evaluating AI-generated Python code. In an experimental exercise given to students in an introductory Python course at a business university, students wrote their own solutions to a Python program and then compared their solutions with AI-generated code. They evaluated both solutions…

Debugging (or troubleshooting) provides a rich context to foster problem-solving. Yet, while we know much about some problems and strategies that novices face in programming on-screen, we know far less about debugging and troubleshooting in the context of physical computing, where coding issues may overlap with materially embedded problems. In…

Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, most of these tools only measure the similarity between assignment submissions, and do not actually identify which are suspicious of plagiarism. This work…

Background: Peer evaluation in software engineering (SE) project courses enhances the learning experience of students. It also helps instructors monitor and assess both teams and individual students. Peer evaluations might influence the way individual students and teams work; therefore, the quality of the peer evaluations should be tracked through…

This study aims to explain the relationships between secondary school students' digital literacy, computer programming self-efficacy and computational thinking self-efficacy. The study group consists of 204 secondary school students. A relational survey model was used in the research method and three different data collection tools were used to…

Advancements in computation and machine learning have revolutionized science, enabling researchers to address once insurmountable challenges. Bioinformatics, a field that heavily relies on computer-driven analysis of biological data, has greatly benefited from these developments. However, traditional bioinformatics instruction frequently lacks the…

Most existing autograders used for grading programming assignments are based on unit testing, which is tedious to implement for programs with graphical output and does not allow testing for other code aspects, such as programming style or structure. We present a novel autograding approach based on machine learning that can successfully check the…

The paper discusses an alternative method of assessing the difficulty of pupils' programming tasks to determine their age appropriateness. Building a program takes the form of its successive iterations. Thus, it is possible to monitor the number of times such a program was built by the solver. The variance of the number of program builds can be…

Computer programming provides a framework for interdisciplinary learning in sciences, arts and languages. However, increasing integration of programming in K--12 shows that the block-based and text-based dichotomy of programming environments does not reflect the spectrum of their affordance. Hence, educators are confronted with a fundamental…