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Rudimentary programming is an essential, transferrable, problem solving skill in many higher education (HE) programmes in academic institutions including Software Engineering, Business Information Technology, Computer Games Development, Design and Technology. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the problematic issues associated with teaching programming by the utilisation of a new novel teaching approach called games-based construction learning (GBCL) to attempt to increase motivation, engagement and learning effectiveness. An international and national trend is to introduce coding at earlier education levels resulting in upper primary education (PE) being the focus of this paper to ascertain if GBCL using Scratch to teach programming concepts is more effective at different levels of upper PE.

A large-scale empirical study introducing GBCL to teach programming concepts into 16 classes between levels 4 and 7 in PE utilising 384 children. A detailed implementation framework for GBCL using Scratch in PE was utilised to address all incorporation issues and the games constructed by the children scored utilising a game codification scheme specifically designed to address programming and design as a quantification rubric. The experiment utilised eight 1- h lessons on GBCL using Scratch.

The resulted in 178 games of varying levels of complexity developed. The results indicated that GBCL was an effective mechanism to teach programming concepts using Scratch at all levels of upper PE. Primary seven students scored higher in relation to the design metric of the quantification codification rubric.

Under the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) in Scotland non-traditional teaching approaches are encouraged and development of digital literacy skill is highly advocated. This has resulted in a new approach, novel approach called GBCL where children create their own games utilising an engine such as Scratch is gaining significant attention in terms of being a novel approach. Despite a plethora of similar studies associated with GBCL, it is still not as developed as games-based learning and requires further empirical studies to support the validity of the approach and resolve identified issues.

Computer programming itself can lead to a highly rewarding career in a number of sectors from games development to banking, such as cybersecurity and systems development. In the last decade, in particular due to the ubiquitous nature of technology there is an increasing international and national trend associated with teaching rudimentary programming concepts at a far younger age including secondary education and the upper PE level. Introducing programming at an earlier level is now being considered essential as the path to transfer from novice to expert programmer level in time is considered nearly a decade approximately. The introduction of GBCL interventions may yield positive results in a supplementary learning capacity in accordance with the CfE and increase the educational effectiveness of programming education in later levels of education.

This study presents a large-scale empirical evaluation of GBCL in upper PE utilising a compiled implementation framework for incorporation and a detailed game codification scheme to quantify the games produced highlighting coding constructs and design.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of self-regulated programming learning on undergraduate students’ academic performance and motivation compared to traditional methods.

This study was conducted with an explanatory sequential mixed method. Participants consist of 31 undergraduate students studying in the department of computer and instructional technologies education. The students were separated into two groups as experimental (n = 15) and control (n = 16) in the robotic programming course. Academic performance tests, programming motivation scale and interview form were used as data collection tools. After collecting quantitative data, interviews were conducted with the students regarding their academic performance and motivation.

The results indicated that the self-regulated programming learning process can contribute positively to students’ academic performance and motivation compared to traditional methods. Students stated that self-regulated learning strategies can positively affect their academic performance and motivation.

In this study, a self-regulated learning support system was designed to encourage students to use self-regulated learning strategies. This study has the potential to contribute to the gap in the literature, especially as a study of adapting the phased model of self-regulated learning to programming teaching. Instructors can use the self-regulating programming learning framework by adapting it to different disciplines.

Programming education is being rapidly transformed by generative AI tools and educators must determine how best to support students in this context. This study aims to explore the experiences of programming educators and students to inform future education provision.

Twelve students and six members of faculty in a small technology-focused university were interviewed. Thematic analysis of the interview data was combined with data collected from a survey of 44 students at the same university. Self-determination theory was applied as an analytical framework.

Three themes were identified – bespoke learning, affect and support – that significantly impact motivation and learning outcomes in programming education. It was also found that students are already making extensive use of large language models (LLMs). LLMs can significantly improve learner autonomy and sense of competence by improving the options for bespoke learning; fostering emotions that are conducive to engendering and maintaining motivation; and inhibiting the negative affective states that discourage learning. However, current LLMs cannot adequately provide or replace social support, which is still a key factor in learner motivation.

Integrating the use of LLMs into curricula can improve learning motivation and outcomes. It can also free educators from certain tasks, leaving them with more time and capacity to focus their attention on developing social learning opportunities to further enhance learner motivation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore the relationship between motivation and LLM use in programming education.

While it is particularly important that professional programs help teachers become members of a community of practice, especially in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lack of research about strategies to effectively encourage the development of a community of practice and to support teachers’ transformation of their way of teaching. Thus, this paper aims to report on lessons learned from a blended professional development (PD) program for elementary and middle school teachers in Japan focused on computer programming education. In particular, the authors explored how application of the creative learning principles in the blended teacher PD may have helped to nurture a community of practice among teachers in Japan, and how the creative learning principles may be a valuable framework for designing online or blended teacher PD to support teachers’ transition into emergency remote education.

This paper reports on the lessons learned from two iterations of blended teacher PD situated within a larger design-based research project on applying creative learning pedagogy in teacher PD. Creative learning is a learning approach focused on engagement in personally meaningful projects by tinkering with materials and learning from peers. A total of 26 teachers and coaches participated, all of whom work in elementary or middle schools across Nagano prefecture in Japan. Participant experiences were evaluated based on a pre-survey and a post-survey conducted before and after the in-person kick-off camp; observation notes taken; a final report submitted by each teacher; a debrief meeting at the end of the program; and semi-structured interviews with three selected participants after the program concluded. For this paper, the authors focus on two participants who fully and actively engaged in the program, and they introduce their stories to highlight the outcomes from the PD.

The results highlight how a blended PD designed to support creative learning of teachers provided teachers with opportunities to gain help from other teachers and cultivate their expertise. The results also illustrated that how a community of practice emerged from the PD program, providing teachers with moral support when they tried new lesson designs. This paper offers several recommendations for designing professional learning experiences for instructional designers and professional developers that incorporate remote learning technologies.

While an increased number of studies have shown the values of online and blended communities of practice for teacher PD, there are still limited insights on different strategies to support teachers in transforming their teaching practices. They generally do not provide teachers with opportunities to continue learning with and from one another beyond the program itself. This study examined the teachers’ experiences in a unique PD that implemented a creative learning approach into a blended learning environment for teachers.

The purpose of this study is to analyse and discuss K-12 mathematics and technology teachers' perceptions on integrating programming in their teaching and learning activities, and perceptions on different programming tools.

The approach of a case study was used, with data collected from three instances of a professional development programming course for K-12 teachers in mathematics and technology.

The findings show that there are perceived challenges and opportunities with learning and integrating programming, and with different programming tools. Many teachers perceive programming as fun, but lack the time to learn and implement it, and view different programming tools as both complementary to each other and with individual opportunities and challenges.

The practical implication of the research is that it can provide guidance for teachers and other stakeholders that are in the process of integrating programming in K-12 education. Further, the research provides useful information on teachers' experiences on working with different programming tools.

The social implication of the research is that the overall aim of the nation-wide integration process might not succeed if the challenges identified in this study are not addressed, which could have negative effects on the development of students' digital competence.

The value of the research is that it identifies important challenges and opportunities for the integration of programming. That is, that many teachers perceive the different programming tools available as complimentary to each other, but are hesitating about what is expected of the integration. Findings could also be valuable for future course design of the teacher professional development.

The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners’ computational thinking.

By analyzing the mechanism of action of ITF on the development of computational thinking, an ITF strategy and corresponding ITS acting on the whole process of programming problem-solving were developed to realize the evaluation of programming problem-solving ideas based on program logic. On the one hand, a lexical and syntactic analysis of the programming problem solutions input by the learners is performed and presented with a tree-like structure. On the other hand, by comparing multiple algorithms, it is implemented to compare the programming problem solutions entered by the learners with the answers and analyze the gaps to give them back to the learners to promote the improvement of their computational thinking.

This study clarifies the mechanism of the role of ITF-based ITS in the computational thinking development process. Results indicated that the ITS designed in this study is effective in promoting students’ computational thinking, especially for low-level learners. It also helped to improve students’ learning motivation, and reducing cognitive load, while there’s no significant difference among learners of different levels.

This study developed an ITS based on ITF to address the problem of learners’ difficulty in obtaining real-time guidance in the current programming problem-solving-based computational thinking development, providing a good aid for college students’ independent programming learning.

It is widely acknowledged that the computer has caused great societal changes over recent years, but the purpose of this paper is to relate specifically to those due to the use of computers in education and teaching about computing. The adoption and use of computers in education was very much a socio-technical process with influence from people, organisations, processes and technologies: of a variety of human and non-human actors.

This paper makes use of actor-network theory to analyse these events and their educational and societal impact. Data were collected from published sources, interviews with those involved at the time, discussions and from personal experience and observations.

Computers have, of course, had a huge impact on society, but particularly in relation to the use of computers in school education there was a different societal impact. Some of this related directly to education, some to school administration and some to student attitudes, experiences and knowledge.

The paper investigates the development of early courses in computing in universities and schools in Victoria, Australia. The paper does not, however, consider the use of computers in university research, only in education.

The paper describes the significant educational events of the era from punch-card tabulating machines in the 1930s to micro-computers in the late 1980s, and investigates the relationship between the development of courses in the Universities and those in the more vocationally oriented Colleges of Advanced Education. It examines whether one followed from the other. It also investigates the extent of the influence of the universities and CAEs on school computing.

The advent of the computer made a significant impact on university and school education even before the internet, Google, Wikipedia and smart phones in the late 1990s and 2000s. Computers in schools cause a rethink of how teaching should be handled and of the role of the teacher.

This paper investigates the history of computers and education in both universities and schools in Victoria, Australia over the period from the 1930s to the early 1990s. It considers how and why this technological adoption occurred, and the nature of the resulting educational and societal change this produced. Primary and High School use of computers did not commence until the 1970s but prior to this there is a considerable and interesting history associated with the development of Higher Education courses relating to computing.

Testing is one of the indispensable activities in software development and is being adopted as an independent course by software engineering (SE) departments at universities worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to carry out an investigation of the performance of learners about testing, given the tendencies in the industry and motivation caused by the unavailability of similar studies in software testing field.

This study is based on the data collected over three years (between 2012 and 2014) from students taking the software testing course. The course is included in the second year of undergraduate curriculum for the bachelor of engineering (SE).

It has been observed that, from the performance perspective, automated testing outperforms structural and functional testing techniques, and that a strong correlation exists among these three approaches. Moreover, a strong programming background does help toward further success in structural and automated testing, but has no effect on functional testing. The results of different teaching styles within the course are also presented together with an analysis exploring the relationship between students’ gender and success in the software testing course, revealing that there is no difference in terms of performance between male and female students in the course. Moreover, it is advisable to introduce teaching concepts one at a time because students find it difficult to grasp the ideas otherwise.

These findings are based on the analysis conducted using three years of data collected while teaching a course in testing. Obviously, there are some limitations to this study. For example, student’s strength in programming is calculated using the score of C programming courses taken in previous year/semester. Such scores may not reflect their current level of programming knowledge. Furthermore, attempt was made to ensure that the exercises given for different testing techniques have similar difficulty level to guarantee that the difference in success between these testing techniques is due to the inherent complexity of the technique itself and not because of different exercises. Still, there is small probability that a certain degree of change in success may be due to the difference in the difficulty levels of the exercises. As such, it is obviously premature to consider the present results as final since there is a lack of similar type of studies, with which the authors can compare the results. Therefore, more work needs to be done in different settings to draw sound conclusions in this respect.

Although there are few studies (see e.g. Chan et al., 2005; Garousi and Zhi, 2013; Ng et al., 2004) exploring the preference of testers over distinct software testing techniques in the industry, there appears to be no paper comparing the preferences and performances of learners in terms of different testing techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effects of algorithm teaching on the problem-solving skills of deaf-hard hearing students.

In this research, a pre-test and post-test problem-solving scale was applied to the single group (16 deaf-hard hearing students at a secondary school level) that had received algorithm education. Pre-test and post-test results were compared in order to see whether there was a significant difference among students in terms of their problem-solving attitudes. Students’ levels of performing the applications were examined through observation forms and their opinions about algorithm teaching were received.

As a result of the research, it was determined that implemented algorithm teaching had a significant effect on improving the problem-solving skills of the students.

Scratch training can be administered as either a compulsory or an optional course for hearing students as the Scratch programme offers the opportunity of teaching algorithmic reasoning with games, making the courses entertaining and giving students the chance to create their own designs which helps to improve their creative problem-solving skills and their motivation accordingly. Scratch teaching can be beneficial in developing students’ problem-solving behaviours and creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the effect of different representations while teaching basic algorithmic concepts to novice programmers.

A learning activity was designed and mediated with two conceptually different learning environments, each one used by a different group. The first group used the learning environment “Visual Flowchart”, which enables the students to construct and examine an algorithm using visual representation based on actual flowchart objects. The second group used the software “Language Interpreter”, which allows the students to express an algorithms using pseudocode.

Analysis of results among the two groups showed no statistically significant differences in the students’ performance with respect to the tool they used to solve the activity, the school stream they followed in high school and their gender.

The lack of difference among the two groups could be attributed to the non‐complicated nature of the given activity. In addition, longitudinal studies of the effect of the different representation in the frame of an introductory first semester academic course in computer science could further validate the results.

Two alternative learning environments aimed to support learning of basic programming skills.

Two alternative learning environments were presented and discussed in detail, aimed to support learning of basic programming skills. The conclusions of the present study are in contrast to the research that has taken place in the past which compared usage of flowcharts and pseudocode to educate novice programmers, and wider adoption of “flowcharts” was depicted.