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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…

Blocks-based programming has become the lingua franca for introductory coding. Studies have found that experience with blocks-based programming can help beginners learn more traditional text-based languages. We explore how blocks…

Background and context: Debugging is a significant and often frustrating challenge for beginner programmers. Understanding students' debugging behaviours and strategies can help to identify common difficulties and inform approaches for…

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…

Block-based environments such as Scratch are increasingly popular in programming education. While block syntax reduces surface errors, semantic bugs remain common and challenging for novices to resolve. Existing debugging workflows…

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…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

Lowering the barriers to computer programming requires understanding how to scaffold learning. Parsons problems, which require learners to drag-and-drop blocks of code into the correct order and indentation, are proving to be beneficial for…

Structure editors operate directly on a program's syntactic tree structure. At first glance, this allows for the exciting possibility that such an editor could enforce correctness properties: programs could be well-formed and sometimes even…

In programming, better tools often yield better results. For that, modern programming environments offer mechanisms to allow for their extensibility. The closer those tools are to the code, the easier it is for programmers to map the…

Novice programmers need to write basic code as part of the learning process, but they often face difficulties. To assist struggling students, we recently implemented personalized Parsons problems, which are code puzzles where students…

The better developers can learn software tools, the faster they can start using them and the more efficiently they can later work with them. Tutorials are supposed to help here. While in the early days of computing, mostly text tutorials…

Novice programmers often struggle to understand how code executes and to form the abstract mental models necessary for effective problem-solving, challenges that are amplified in large, diverse introductory courses where students'…

Generative AI models, specifically large language models (LLMs), have made strides towards the long-standing goal of text-to-code generation. This progress has invited numerous studies of user interaction. However, less is known about the…

This study examines how AI code assistants shape novice programmers experiences during a two-part exam in an introductory programming course. In the first part, students completed a programming task with access to AI support; in the second,…

AI code generators like OpenAI Codex have the potential to assist novice programmers by generating code from natural language descriptions, however, over-reliance might negatively impact learning and retention. To explore the implications…

TypeScript has rapidly become a popular language for modern web development, yet its effect on software faults remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of bugs in real-world TypeScript projects.…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch are increasingly popular for programming education and end-user programming. Recent program analyses build on the insight that source code can be modelled using techniques from natural language…

In recent years, Jupyter notebooks have grown in popularity in several domains of software engineering, such as data science, machine learning, and computer science education. Their popularity has to do with their rich features for…

Novice programmers often struggle with problem solving due to the high cognitive loads they face. Furthermore, many introductory programming courses do not explicitly teach it, assuming that problem solving skills are acquired along the…