Parsons problems are well-regarded activities for scaffolding beginner programmers. We present a technique for employing Parsons problems in a cohort of professionals aiming to upskill in programming and data analytics. Recognising the distinct learning ...

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the difficulty in ...

In introductory programming, students must develop an accurate mental model of how programming languages work. This model, often called a ‘notional machine,’ is essential for understanding how a machine interprets and executes code. Existing research ...

In computing classrooms, building an open-ended programming project engages students in the process of designing and implementing an idea of their own choice. An explicit planning process has been shown to help students build more complex and ambitious ...

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically generative AI (GenAI) are threatening to fundamentally reshape computing and society. Largely driven by large language models (LLMs), many tools are now able to interpret and generate ...

Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in code-generation models that produce source code from natural language and code-based prompts with high accuracy. This is likely to have profound effects in the classroom, where novices learning to code ...

Background and Context: Open-ended programming projects encourage novice students to choose and pursue projects based on their own ideas and interests, and are widely used in many introductory programming courses. However, novice programmers encounter ...

The recent emergence of code generation tools powered by large language models has attracted wide attention. Models such as OpenAI Codex can take natural language problem descriptions as input and generate highly accurate source code solutions, with ...

Many students rely on examples when learning to program, but they often face barriers when incorporating these examples into their own code and learning the concepts they present. As a step towards designing effective example interfaces that can support ...

The recent advent of highly accurate and scalable large language models (LLMs) has taken the world by storm. From art to essays to computer code, LLMs are producing novel content that until recently was thought only humans could produce. Recent work in ...

Introductory courses usually only teach a small subset of a programming language and its library, in order to focus on the general concepts rather than overwhelm students with the syntactic, semantic and API minutiae of a particular language.

This paper ...

Web-based help-seeking -- finding and utilizing websites to solve a problem -- is a critical skill during programming in both professional and academic settings. However, little work has explored how students, especially novices, engage in web-based help-...

The teaching and assessment of introductory programming involves writing code that solves a problem described by text. Previous research found that OpenAI's Codex, a natural language machine learning model trained on billions of lines of code, performs ...

Introductory computer programming courses are widely popular, however have notoriously high attrition rates, as much as 50% [5], and poor overall satisfaction scores on prior surveys. Core concepts and syntax of the language being taught can be difficult ...

The introduction of OpenAI Codex sparked a surge of interest in the impact of generative AI models on computing education practices. Codex is also the underlying model for GitHub Copilot, a plugin which makes AI-generated code accessible to students ...

In recent years, computational thinking (CT) has focused on how children and citizens develop basic computing skills which empower them to participate in a digitised society and broaden participation and engagement with CT. We present the exploration ...

Open-ended programming engages students by connecting computing with their real-world experience and personal interest. However, such open-ended programming tasks can be challenging, as they require students to implement features that they may be ...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been driven by an exponential growth in digitised data. Natural language processing, in particular, has been transformed by machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 which generates human-like text ...

The frame-based programming language Stride has the potential to simultaneously simplify and accelerate the task of coding for novices. This is facilitated through a combination of reduced cognitive load, assistance when editing and the elimination of ...

In recent years, research has increasingly focused on developing intelligent tutoring systems that provide data-driven support for students in need of assistance during programming assignments. One goal of such intelligent tutors is to provide students ...