Variables in Practice. An Observation of Teaching Variables in Introductory Programming MOOCs

Motivation. Many people interested in learning a programming language choose online courses to develop their skills. The concept of variables is one of the most foundational ones to learn, but can be hard to grasp for novices. Variables are researched, but to our knowledge, few empirical observations on how the concept is taught in practice...

Grading 600+ students: A Case Study on Peer and Self Grading

Grading large classes has become a challenging and expensive task for many universities. The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), located in the Netherlands, has observed a large increase in student numbers over the past few years. Given the large growth of the student population, grading all the submissions results in high costs. We...

Pragmatic software testing education

Software testing is an important topic in software engineering education, and yet highly challenging from an educational perspective: students are required to learn several testing techniques, to be able to distinguish the right technique to apply, to evaluate the quality of their test suites, and to write maintainable test code. In this paper,...

Thinking out of the Box: Comparing metaphors for variables in programming education

When teaching novices programming, misconceptions can occur. Misconception are incorrect beliefs about certain programming concept. For example, some novices think that a variable can hold multiple values, in the case of two consecutive assignment statements, such as x = 5; x = 7. While explaining variables introductory materials often use...

A Dataset of Scratch Programs: Scraped, Shaped and Scored

Scratch is increasingly popular, both as an introductory programming language and as a research target in the computing education research field. In this paper, we present a dataset of 250K recent Scratch projects from 100K different authors scraped from the Scratch project repository. We processed the projects' source code and metadata to...