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Understanding student difficulties in programming is a complex challenge due to the wide range of topics and the abundant varieties of misconceptions and errors. This paper presents the design and development of a fine-grained taxonomy that…
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…
Young learners are increasingly introduced to programming, and one of the main challenges for educators is to achieve learning success while also creating enthusiasm. As it is particularly difficult to achieve this enthusiasm initially in…
Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple…
Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is…
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…
Alloy is well known a declarative modeling language. A key strength of Alloy is its scenario finding toolset, the Analyzer, which allows users to explore all valid scenarios that adhere to the model's constraints up to a user-provided…
AI-based chatbots have the potential to accelerate learning and teaching, but may also have counterproductive consequences without thoughtful design and scaffolding. To better understand teachers' perspectives on large language model…
Code data has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear which aspects of code are most responsible. We investigate this question with a systematic, data-centric framework. We…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain in popularity, it is important to understand how novice programmers use them. We present a thematic analysis of 33 learners, aged 10-17, independently learning Python through 45 code-authoring tasks…
Gradual typing combines static and dynamic typing in the same language, offering the benefits of both to programmers. Static typing provides error detection and strong guarantees while dynamic typing enables rapid prototyping and flexible…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code editing, yet the prevalent full-code generation paradigm suffers from severe efficiency bottlenecks, posing challenges for interactive coding assistants that demand low latency and…
Code editing constitutes a fundamental practice in software development, wherein developers modify existing codebases according to natural language requirements. Accurate code editing necessitates a comprehensive understanding of both the…
Python is a widely adopted programming language, valued for its simplicity and flexibility. However, its dynamic type system poses significant challenges for automated refactoring - an essential practice in software evolution aimed at…
Debugging is a demanding aspect of programming yet guidance on how to teach it effectively remains limited. Novices often struggle to recognize impasses regulate their problem solving and manage cognitive load and stress. This study…
Creative coding is a rapidly expanding domain for both artistic expression and computational education. Numerous libraries and IDEs support creative coding, however there has been little consideration of how the environments themselves…
Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…
This paper documents a year-long experiment to "profile" the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added…
Code editing is a foundational task in software development, where its effectiveness depends on whether it introduces desired code property changes without changing the original code's intended functionality. Existing approaches often…
Many programming problems call for turning geometrical thoughts into code: tables, hierarchical structures, nests of objects, trees, forests, graphs, and so on. Linear text does not do justice to such thoughts. But, it has been the dominant…