As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and
acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the …

While functionality and correctness of code has traditionally been the main focus of
computing educators, quality aspects of code are getting increasingly more attention. High …

There is a wealth of literature dealing with the difficulties of novice programmers with basic
programming constructs such as variables, assignment and conditionals. In this paper we …

Problem solving capabilities have often been reported by teachers as a key benefit from
creative coding activities in school-age children. However, few studies to date have defined …

In this paper we report on an empirical study into the use of software metrics as a way of
estimating the difficulty of code comprehension tasks. Our results indicate that software …

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 …

Novices' functionally-correct code is often redundant, verbose, or un-idiomatic. Such code
could indicate shallow understanding of the programming language, or unfamiliarity with …

Failure rates in introductory programming courses are notoriously high, and researchers
have noted that students struggle with the assessments that we typically use to evaluate …

In this paper, we report on an ITiCSE-13 Working Group that developed a set of 654 multiple-
choice questions on CS1 and CS2 topics, the Canterbury QuestionBank. We describe the …

We present the utilization of the educational SOLO taxonomy for assessing algorithmic
features of introductory programming. The SOLO taxonomy was recently studied by CS …