Related papers: How Do Code Smells Affect Skill Growth in Scratch …

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…

Manually annotating data for computational social science tasks can be costly, time-consuming, and emotionally draining. While recent work suggests that LLMs can perform such annotation tasks in zero-shot settings, little is known about how…

Object-Oriented programming is frequently challenging for undergraduate Computer Science students, particularly in understanding abstract concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. Although the literature outlines…

Background: Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are increasingly used in introductory programming courses to provide real-time code generation, debugging, and explanations. While these tools can boost productivity and code quality,…

Effective software development relies on managing both collaboration and technology, but sociotechnical challenges can harm team dynamics and increase technical debt. Although teams working on ML enabled systems are interdisciplinary,…

The identification of code smells is largely recognized as a subjective task. Consequently, the automated detection tools available are insufficient to deal with the whole subjectivity involved in the task, requiring human validation.…

LLMs have achieved strong performance on text-based programming tasks, yet they remain unreliable for block-based languages such as Scratch. Scratch programs exhibit deeply nested, non-linear structures, event-driven concurrency across…

How can AI enhance creative coding experiences for families? This study explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) in helping families with creative coding using Scratch. Based on our previous user study involving a prototype AI…

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…

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…

Angular is one of the most widely adopted frameworks for developing large-scale, dynamic web applications. As projects increase in scope and complexity, developers face growing challenges in managing architecture and maintaining clean,…

Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large…

Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to measure.In this paper, we make the journey fromdefining a formal measure of creativity that is efficientlycomputable to applying the…

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running…

Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…

When writing software code, developers typically prioritise functionality over security, either consciously or unconsciously through biases and heuristics. This is often attributed to tangible pressures such as client requirements, but…

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…

Community smells reflect poor organizational practices that often lead to socio-technical issues and the accumulation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). While prior studies have explored these problems in general software systems,…

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in…

Code language models have emerged as useful tools for various programming tasks, yet they often struggle when it comes to complex ones. In this paper, we explore the potential of curriculum learning in enhancing the performance of these…