Related papers: Educating Programmers: A Reflection on Barriers to…
Reinforcement Learning faces an important challenge in partial observable environments that has long-term dependencies. In order to learn in an ambiguous environment, an agent has to keep previous perceptions in a memory. Earlier memory…
Empathy has been discussed as a relevant human capability in software engineering, particularly in activities that require understanding users, stakeholders, and the societal implications of technological systems. This relevance becomes…
Programming by Example (PBE) is the task of inducing computer programs from input-output examples. It can be seen as a type of machine learning where the hypothesis space is the set of legal programs in some programming language. Recent…
Children learn though play. We introduce the analogous idea of learning programs through play. In this approach, a program induction system (the learner) is given a set of tasks and initial background knowledge. Before solving the tasks,…
Educators are more than workers within educational systems; they are stewards of educational systems. They must analyze student performance data, identify patterns that inform targeted interventions and personalized learning plans,…
Students of visualization come to formal education with an abundance of personal experience. However, one's exposure to graphics through media and education may not be sufficiently diverse to appreciate the nuance and complexity required to…
We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open…
Computer animation in the past decade has become one of the most noticeable features of technology-based learning environments. With today's high educational demands as well as the lack of time provided for certain courses, classical…
An instructor teaching a course on Software Architecture needs to be more reflective to engage students productively in the learning activities. In this reflective essay, the author identifies a few decisive moments referred to as…
Pedagogical approaches focusing on stereotypical code solutions, known as programming plans, can increase problem-solving ability and motivate diverse learners. However, plan-focused pedagogies are rarely used beyond introductory…
Despite tremendous progress, machine learning and deep learning still suffer from incomprehensible predictions. Incomprehensibility, however, is not an option for the use of (deep) reinforcement learning in the real world, as unpredictable…
Mastering one or more programming languages has historically been the gateway to implementing ideas on a computer. Today, that gateway is widening with advances in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding…
Background and Context: While debugging is recognized as an essential practice, for many students, encountering bugs can generate emotional responses such as fear and anxiety that can lead to disengagement and the avoidance of computer…
This study examined the impact of Code.org's block-based coding curriculum on primary school students' computational thinking, motivation, attitudes, and academic performance. Twenty students participated, and a range of tools was used: the…
Teaching programming to novices is best done with tools with simpler user interfaces than professional IDEs that are tailored for experienced programmers. In a distance learning situation it is also important to have a development…
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot…
Why do biased predictions arise? What interventions can prevent them? We evaluate 8.2 million algorithmic predictions of math performance from $\approx$400 AI engineers, each of whom developed an algorithm under a randomly assigned…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
Cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how it is interpreted by developers. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses…
Difficulty adjustment in practice exercises has been shown to be beneficial for learning. However, previous research has mostly investigated close-ended tasks, which do not offer the students multiple ways to reach a valid solution.…