Investigating the Perception and Effects of Misunderstandings in Java Code

Although writing code seems trivial at times, problems arise when humans misinterpret what source code actually does. One of the potential causes are “atoms of confusion”; the smallest possible patterns of misinterpretable source code. The misunderstandings and errors have been studied in past for the C programming language. They are found to...

Generating Teacher Feedback through Parsons Problems

As computer science lies at the heart of almost all technological progress, widespread computer science education, and particularly programming education, is of great importance. In order to reach a large group of students, secondary schools can play an important role. However, students have difficulty learning programming concepts. Programming...

Design of Human Computer Interface for blind children to learn programming languages

As the modern world progressing towards digital technologies, there is an increasing need for school students to learn programming skills so that they fit into the labor market now and in the future. Tangible programming toys and block-based languages are popular among younger children to learn to code. Students in middle and high school in...

Teaching Computational Thinking - What do our educators need?

In the Netherlands a task-force, supported by the institute of curriculum development, Stichting Leerplan Ontwikkeling (SLO), has been assembled to define core objectives and learning goals for digital literacy that are to be finalized by 2019. The SLO defined digital literacy with the following four elements: ICT basic skills, computational...