Research efforts tried to expose students to security topics early in the undergraduate CS curriculum. However, such efforts are rarely adopted in practice and remain less effective when it comes to writing secure code. In our prior work [18], we ...

This work extends previous research on subgoal labeled instructions by examining their effect across a semester-long, Java-based CS1 course. Across four quizzes, students were asked to explain in plain English the process that they would use to solve a ...

Students of introductory programming courses are expected to develop higher-order thinking skills to inspect, understand and modify code. However, although novices can correctly write small programs, they appear to lack a more abstract, comprehensive ...

We want undergraduate students to develop higher-order thinking skills that enable them to master program behaviour. Nonetheless, many students of both introductory and advanced programming courses appear to struggle with the abstraction required for ...

This paper presents an assessment designed to measure computational thinking skills of fourth grade students. The students in two public schools were given a set of Scratch programming challenges. The SOLO taxonomy was used to classify student ...

Recent studies have linked the ability of novice (CS1) programmers to read and explain code with their ability to write code. This study extends earlier work by asking CS2 students to explain object-oriented data structures problems that involve ...

Scratch is a visual programming environment that is widely used by young people. We investigated if Scratch can be used to teach concepts of computer science. We developed new learning materials for middle-school students that were designed according to ...

This paper explores the programming knowledge of novices using Biggs' SOLO taxonomy. It builds on previous work of Lister et al. (2006) and addresses some of the criticisms of that work. The research was conducted by studying the exam scripts for 120 ...