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This Research-to-Practice, Work in Progress Paper focuses on how learners experience creation of infographics as a summarizing assignment in an advanced level e-course on software engineering management (SEM). We have previously investigated how learners perceive infographics as a repeated reflection assignment during a requirements engineering e-course. To complement this research project, we studied how learners experience the use of infographics as a method for summarizing a whole software engineering management course in e-education setting. The SEM course participants (N=36) found that infographics as a summarizing assignment required complex learning that was altogether deemed highly valuable. Participants reported on a good focus on learning tasks and learning of new skills. The participants who were in working life already found the infographics creation relevant in the light of their work (cf. authenticity). In sum, the creation of summarizing infographics appeared to yield in-depth learning with references to authenticity. The results encourage more research on the topic in computing and engineering education courses. peerReviewed

This longitudinal study investigates the impact of an extra-curricular programming workshop in student interest development in computer science. The workshop was targeted at 12–18-year old youngsters. A survey was sent to all previous participants with a known home address; 31.5% responded the survey (n = 197). This data was then combined with pre-workshop survey data, and analyzed with mixed methods. Positive development of interest was discovered for 57% of the respondents, of which nearly all attributed their interest increase to the workshop at least partly (92%). Qualitative inspection revealed that the workshop provided three anchors that facilitated students’ reengagement with programming and development of interest: disciplinary content, a concrete artifact built by students themselves, and tools. Neutral development and interest regress were also discovered, though the impact of the workshop on these interest trajectories remains unclear. peerReviewed

This work-in-progress paper in research category is concerned with students’ perceptions of justice in software engineering group projects. Taking a directed content analysis approach, the aim is to analyze the relevance of Adams’ theory of Equity for small-group project education. The analysis was applied to the data collected from a third-year project course in which students encounter an open-ended group assignment. The results indicate that the theory can serve as a useful framework that helps teachers to identify justice-related issues in project courses. On the other hand, it was concluded that special carefulness is advisable considering the simplicity of the theory. peerReviewed

Full paper in Research category: Literature provides creativity definitions that are applicable to educational settings. For example, the definition by Plucker et al. emphasizes the ‘social context’ in which the usefulness and novelty of a creative outcome is evaluated, and notes that this emphasis allows students’ coursework to be deemed creative without extraordinary characteristics. Computing educators tend to assume that incoming CS course populations welcome creativity, and utilize application contexts (e.g., games, media, arts, and robots) in which creativity is a central attribute. Previous research also suggests that beginner CS students may initially possess versatile identities regarding what computing will entail. This article seeks to provide further evidence for creativity expectation among students starting a CS1 course, looking at how and to what extent creativity is acknowledged. This agenda was observed to be possible using a large data set (N=1,946, eight-year period) in which students at the very beginning of their computing studies characterized what programming is. Qualitatively different creativity-related categories were identified and frequencies for these categories were counted in a sample of 240 respondents. Further content analysis was applied to the remaining data by using word searches. The categories identified were: freedom to create and express, creativity needed in problem solving, programming as a circumstance for personalized activity, associations with arts, creative innovations, tolerance to open-ended situations, aesthetics and elegance of programming, and programming as a flow-like activity. In the sample of 240, 59% of the data was interpreted to refer to creativity, and among the word-searched portion of the data, nearly one-third was interpreted to indicate it. The illustrations and the numbers of references support educators’ assumptions as they consider introducing creativity-related education. peerReviewed

This work-in-progress paper in the research category investigates students’ experiences of learning over two project-based courses, of which the first is taken during bachelor studies and the second is taken during master studies. The research goal was to explore if and how the first project experience was considered beneficial to the latter. A pilot interview was conducted and analyzed for qualitatively different themes. Transformative learning theory (TLT) is introduced as the theoretical framework because of its focus on persistent learning originating in transformations in meaning perspectives. The results are discussed in the context of TLT, and they inform curriculum design and research on project-based learning.

Our Work in Progress Paper in Innovative Practice Category focuses on how learners’ experience use of infographics in advanced level e-course on requirements engineering (RE). Infographics are visual representations of information in such a way that information can be easily understood at a glance. Most of the previous infographics studies have been conducted in the context of inquiry learning. To complement this research, we studied how learners experience use of infographics as a method for reflective assignment and hence if the usage of infographics supported conceptualization about RE. We adopted a qualitative content analysis approach, applying thematic network analysis to the data received from five case learners. This approach proposes graphical networks as an aid for analyzing and synthesizing qualitative data into basic, organizing, and global themes. The thematic network analysis produced two global, seven organizational, and 53 basic themes. The global themes were named “Visual literacy” and “Conceptualization”. In addition, the e-course supervisor evaluated learners’ infographics according to assessment criteria. Based on these analyses, learners can, using infographics, concentrate on essential topics, distill information, and develop their skills for visual literacy and conceptualization. The results suggest that infographics can be successfully utilized in reflective courses assignments that are typically produced as linear texts. peerReviewed

Computing education research shows substantive interest in novice programming challenges. The present study was rather interested in any phenomena that students would recognize as difficulties during their university studies. The research question was what computing students recognized as their study difficulties after the first year of study. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to the students’ personal writing of the difficulties experienced. The main result categories were independence in new environment, academic requirements, lack of prospects, learning to work, and social integration, which were illustrated by multiple lower level themes. The results inform educators of the wide range of aspects that can underlie complicated studying and help in designing intervention methodology.

Recently, there has been a trend towards adding a multidisciplinary or multicultural element to traditional monodisciplinary project courses in computing and engineering. In this article, we examine the implications of multidisciplinarity for students’ learning experiences during a one-semester project course for real customers. We use a qualitative research approach and base our analysis on students’ learning reports on three instances of a project course titled Multidisciplinary working life project. The main contribution of this article is the unified theoretical picture of the learning mechanisms stemming from multidisciplinarity. Our main conclusions are that (1) students generally have a positive view of multidisciplinarity; (2) multidisciplinary teams enable students to better identify their own expertise, which leads to increased occupational identity; and (3) learning experiences are not fixed, as team spirit and student attitude play an important role in how students react to challenging situations arising from introduction of the multidisciplinarity. peerReviewed

Our Work in Progress Paper in Research to Practice Category focuses on use of recorded audio feedback (RAF) in higher education. RAF is one method for providing feedback that is becoming increasingly popular, especially in e-education. According to previous studies, most learners have an overall positive attitude towards RAF. However, many of the studies have been carried out from learners’ point of view. To complement RAF research, we study how academics experience use of RAF as a feedback method. We adopted a qualitative content analysis approach, applying thematic network analysis to the data received from four case academics. This approach proposes graphical networks as an aid for analyzing and synthesizing qualitative data into basic, organizing and global themes. The thematic network analysis produced two global, nine organizational and 45 basic themes. The two global themes were named “Dialogue diversification” and “Load reduction”. Based on our analysis, academics can, by using RAF, provide learners more relaxed and dialogic feedback and reduce their own workload both mentally and physically.

This Research to Practice full paper reviews two student-made systematic mapping studies and has two goals. The first goal is to report the students’ and the supervisor’s experiences with this research method, and thereby contribute to practice and knowledge on student research. A mapping study was experienced to fit a situation where the student initially had no personal research interests. Moreover, the method was argued to be appropriate for technology-related disciplines where student identities readily match with the pedantry required. Such student reflections suggest that rewarding research experiences can arise from an initially open starting point, and by considering student background in relation to the nature of work with a particular research method. Supervisors should hence learn about their students’ identities when proposing research methods-method matters. The second goal is to disseminate the results of the two mapping studies. The other study mapped intellectual property as an educational research topic, while the other focused on creative coding, similarly as an educational topic. The main results of these studies are summarized and explanation for how the results demonstrate acknowledged benefits of professional mapping studies is provided.

Repeatedly documented positive student responses to project-based learning during its decades-long tradition in CS attest to the effectiveness of learning by doing. Support for reflective learning nevertheless continues to be a topic worth studying because the intensity of project work together with a high technical orientation among CS students often complicate reflective practice. A critical incident-inspired assignment was added to a project-based course to support reflective practice in spring 2017. In a previous study, the authors analyzed how students approached the assignment and whether they found it supportive for learning. The present study content-analyses the situations that triggered experiences of learning, as indicated by student-written incident reports during the projects. The results show that students' experience of needing to do something for the project, hands-on experience, problems they encounter during the work, interaction, and receiving new information are all triggers for learning during the project. Students' internal processing and external demands were also identified as triggers, but do not seem to be effective as often as the other triggers in this data. The results provide a detailed view on the students' learning ``triggers,'' and hence complement the general, favorable assumption of learning by doing.

This paper explores the use of writing-to-learn techniques in the context of programming education. It presents a pilot study where a writing assignment is introduced with the purpose of strengthening students' conceptual understanding of a programming construct. The intervention is evaluated using a single case research design, which is augmented by qualitative interview data. Students participating in the study were mildly positive towards the intervention and the results encourage more work on the topic. This work sets directions for further investigations into how writing-to-learn can strengthen programming education and contributes with insights into what kinds of results can be obtained from similar studies and requirements on study designs.

The Rainfall problem comprises small tasks that have been used to investigate student performance in introductory programming. We conducted several kinds of analyses to inform our understandings of student performance in CS1 relating to this problem. We analyzed implementation approaches and program errors, as in related studies, and also explored the role of test writing vis-a-vis the most common student error. Finally, using correlation analyses and manual inspection of the exam answers, we studied how well the Rainfall problem served as an exam question. The students' implementation choices reflected their familiarity with particular loop constructs, while the single most common error concerned division by zero (DivZ), as in many previous studies. Although many students wrote unit tests to guard against DivZ, they often failed to implement according to the tests, which could be partly attributed to the pen-and-paper exam format. From the correlation analyses, we concluded that some students had difficulties with knowledge transfer and that their conceptual understandings of program constructs were insufficient, regardless of them being able to produce working code. The results inform CS1 teachers in preparing materials and exams.

This article presents an innovation-based course concept for project-based learning. In this course, student groups are asked to ideate and implement a software product based on Open Data and Open API releases. By emphasizing students’ own product ideation, the course requires and enhances self-directed learning skills and prompts the students to see the unlimited possibilities in becoming and being a practitioner of the computing discipline. Relatedly, the course provides a tool to improve student self-efficacy, as the students, coached through challenges, come to know that they are able to produce software using various open interfaces.

This article presents an overview of student difficulties in an introductory functional programming (FP) course taught in Haskell. The motivation for this study stems from our belief that many student difficulties can be alleviated by understanding the underlying causes of errors and by modifying the educational approach and, possibly, the teaching language accordingly. We analyze students' exercise submissions and categorize student errors according to compiler error messages and then manually according to the observed underlying cause. Our study complements earlier studies on the topic by applying computer and manual analysis while focusing on providing descriptive statistics of difficulties specific to FP languages. We conclude that the majority of student errors, regardless of cause, are reported by three different compiler error messages that are not well understood by students. In addition, syntactic features, such as precedence, the syntax of function application, and deeply nested statements, cause difficulties throughout the course.

Phenomenographic studies in computing education research have previously focused on learning "programming thinking" [3], the act of learning to program [2], and conceptions of learning generally in an engineering context [10]. In the present study we analyze and discuss "what it takes to do computer programming" using phenomenography as research approach. This study is based on a large survey dataset gathered in summer outreach courses for K-12 students. The analysis resulted in 12 qualitatively different categories belonging to five separate, emergent themes: Syntax and language features, nature of programming work generally, computational thinking and problem solving, prerequisites, and auxiliary skills. We additionally reviewed whether the students' previous experience explains the categories, and observed that a mechanistic view of programming was prevailing among the inexperienced users, while experienced students more often stressed algorithmic thinking and logical reasoning.This study resembles work done by Eckerdal et al. [3], but gives a K-12 perspective to the question, "what does it takes to do programming?"

Scholars and instructors have been carrying out a multitude of actions to increase students' interest in computer science during the past years. Still, there is a need for knowledge on how these attempts develop student interest. In this qualitative study, we construct illustrative categories out of students who have attended our K-12 coding club and game programming summer course activities. We found four categories: Inactivity, Lack of self-direction, Experimenting, and Professionalism. We also briefly project this abstraction onto a four-phase model of interest development.

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a five-day game design and programming outreach course. The course was offered in summer time and targeted at middle and high school students. In total, 462 youngsters have taken part in 21 course instances. We describe our course concept, and discuss our successes and challenges. In particular, we focus on understanding our student populations by presenting descriptives and statistics of the events, and performing a statistical cluster analysis based on pre- and post-surveys. The cluster analysis was complemented with an analysis of the qualitative data, also originating from the surveys. Taken together, students could be classified into five groups with substantial differences: Enthusiasts, Newbies, Uncertains, Experimenters, and Unsatisfieds. Awareness of the clusters helps instructors of similar courses in developing course content, designing differentiated instruction, and planning follow-up or advanced courses.

Scholars agree on the importance of incorporating use of version control systems (VCSs) into computing curricula, so as to be able to prepare students for today’s distributed and collaborative work places. One of the present-day distributed version control systems (DVCSs) is Git, the system we have used on several courses. In this paper, we report on the challenges for learning and using the system based on a survey data collected from a project-based course and our own teaching experiences during several different kinds of computing courses. The results of this analysis are discussed and recommendations are made. peerReviewed

This paper reports on a practice used for providing additional support to beginner programmers. This practice emphasizes low social barriers to learning, differentiated instruction, and revision. Altogether we try to avoid defensiveness or stigmatization among those who face difficulties. Student feedback indicates their acceptance of this approach while teaching assistants report that helping students in need of additional support improve their teaching skills. Further, we have observed indications of improved student performance. We describe the practice and suggest a particular educational constructionism, i.e., how students construct their social identities within a particular school setting, as an explanation for our positive experiences. As a conclusion, we stress the importance of support implemented through differentiated instruction and informed by constructionism as a CS1 research topic.

Programming education has been traditionally realized in the form of lecturing, but other approaches are under discussion. These emphasize active participation on the part of students, and, as a research activity, consider pedagogic questions holistically. We join this discussion by stating a course design in which we promote a learning-oriented study culture where learning should not be characterized principally as the task of meeting some predefined completion requirements. Moreover, we want our course to be learner-directed meaning that students should take control over their own learning process. Grounded on these goals, this discussion paper gives us a starting point for a subsequent action research undertaking.

Several studies have reported positive experiences with Test-Driven Development (TDD) but the results still diverge. In this study we aim to improve understanding on TDD in educational context. We conducted two experiments on TDD in a master's level university course. The research setting was slightly changed in the second experiment and this paper focuses on comparing the differences between the two rounds. We analyzed the students' perceptions and the difficulties they faced with TDD. The given assignment clearly affected the students' reflections so that the more difficult assignment evoked a richer discussion among the students. Additionally, some insights into teaching TDD are discussed.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) was applied in educational setting right after it became well-known as a key practice of Extreme Programming (XP). Basically, there are many studies reporting positive experiences on TDD applied in different levels of a curriculum. In this paper, we discuss the role of TDD in education through the students' experiences. In our experiment, a challenging programming task was applied in order to see what kind of difficulties the students would encounter and discuss. The students' answers revealed several topics that require a careful treatment in teaching to avoid conceptual confusion. For example, the topics include the scalability of TDD, extent of single test, and discipline.

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming activities. In this article, we present the first results of an exploratory study, in which we teach programming without lectures, exams, or grades, by heavily emphasizing programming activity, and, in a pedagogical sense, student self-direction. This article investigates how students reacted to the active role required of them and what issues emerged in this setting where self-direction was required. The results indicate three issues that should be taken into account when designing a student-driven course: the challenge of supporting students' theoretical synthesis of the topics to be learned, the individual's opportunities for self-direction in a group work setting, and mismatch between individual learning processes and academic course scheduling.