Related papers: Teaching Programming to Novices: A Large-scale Ana…
MIT App Inventor is a drag-and-drop visual programming tool for designing and building fully functional mobile apps for Android. App Inventor promotes a new era of personal mobile computing in which people are empowered to design, create,…
App Planner is an interactive support tool for K-12 students, designed to assist in creating mobile applications. By utilizing generative AI, App Planner helps students articulate the problem and solution through guided conversations via a…
Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors…
Open-ended programming increases students' motivation by allowing them to solve authentic problems and connect programming to their own interests. However, such open-ended projects are also challenging, as they often encourage students to…
Block-based programming environments like Scratch are widely used in introductory programming courses. They facilitate learning pivotal programming concepts by eliminating syntactical errors, but logical errors that break the desired…
Teaching programming through storytelling is a popular pedagogical approach and an active area of research. However, most previous work in this area focused on K-12 students using block-based programming. Little, if any, work has examined…
This paper introduces Aptly, a platform designed to democratize mobile app development, particularly for young learners. Aptly integrates a Large Language Model (LLM) with App Inventor, enabling users to create apps using their natural…
For teachers, automated tool support for debugging and assessing their students' programming assignments is a great help in their everyday business. For block-based programming languages which are commonly used to introduce younger learners…
Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow…
Programmable robots are engaging and fun to play with, interact with the real world, and are therefore well suited to introduce young learners to programming. Introductory robot programming languages often extend existing block-based…
Teachers face several challenges when presenting the fundamental concepts of programming in the classroom. Several tools are introduced to give a visual dimension to support the learning process. These tools rely on code blocks, easily…
Quantum computing has become an active research field in recent years, as its applications in fields such as cryptography, optimization, and materials science are promising. Along with these developments, challenges and opportunities exist…
While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating…
Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…
Introducing computational thinking in primary school curricula implies that teachers have to prepare appropriate lesson material. Typically this includes creating programming tasks, which may overwhelm primary school teachers with lacking…
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…
Surveys in mobile learning developed so far have analysed in a global way the effects on the usage of mobile devices by means of general apps or apps already developed. However, more and more teachers are developing their own apps to…
The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…
Recent studies from all over the world show that more boys than girls play video games. The numbers are different for mobile gaming apps, where 65% of women are identified as gamers. Adapting game design activities for academic purposes is…
Dependency cycles pose a significant challenge to software quality and maintainability. However, there is limited understanding of how practitioners resolve dependency cycles in real-world scenarios. This paper presents an empirical study…