KOLI-CALLING

CS education is coming of age as a discipline spanning the mandatory early school years right through to higher education and beyond. It is a subject to be studied by everyone, whether or not they will ultimately become a software engineer or computer ...

Replicability is a core principle of the scientific method. However, several scientific disciplines have suffered crises in confidence caused, in large part, by attitudes toward replication. This work reports on the value the computing education ...

Computer Science graduates are often expected to work in teams, make decisions and handle responsibilities in dynamic work environments. As such, graduates need to be able to analyse information, solve problems, communicate and reflect on their own role ...

Plagiarism is a common concern for coursework in many situations, particularly where electronic solutions can be provided e.g. computer programs, and leads to unreliability of assessment. Written exams are often used to try to deal with this, and to ...

When learning to program, assignment feedback can easily reinforce a fixed mindset---where one believes intelligence is a fixed ability you either have or you don't. However, this can have negative consequences for learning. The alternative is a growth ...

Conventional wisdom holds that time is an integral part of the learning process. Spacing out learning over multiple study sessions seems to be better for learning than having a single longer study session. Learners should also take pauses from the ...

Teachers have used various approaches and tools to introduce computing concepts in motivating contexts. In this article, we review contextualized programming education in general as well as a form of contextualization, media computing, in particular. ...

According to the World Health Organisation the number one global health issue for young people is their mental health. For students, mental well-being is associated with effective learning, and their ability to navigate through university/college, ...

This paper describes a qualitative study of the factors that contribute to a student's decision to withdraw from CS1. Individual interviews were held with 18 students in a majors-focused CS1 at a large, research-intensive North American university, and ...

E-assessment enjoys growing attention in university courses and is increasingly applied. Although automated feedback and grading for creative question types is a complex endeavor, more and more tools are developed to support e-assessment for ...

In this paper, we survey the work that has been done in threshold concepts in computing since they were first discussed in 2005: concepts that have been identified, methodologies used, and issues discussed. Based on this survey, we then identify some ...

The Koli Calling conference was first held in 2001 as a local conference in Finland. Since then it has grown into an international conference, yet has successfully maintained the community feeling that has always pervaded it. This bibliometric study ...

The design of software is known to be difficult for novice computer scientists. In this paper, we focus on software redesign and on the refactoring necessary to implement a redesign. Redesigning an application aims to improve non-functional aspects such ...

Computational thinking (CT) is a popular phrase that refers to a collection of computational ideas and habits of mind that people in computing disciplines acquire through their work in designing programs, software, simulations, and computations ...

Computer science courses have been shown to have a low rate of student retention. There are many possible reasons for this, and our research group have had considerable success in pinpointing the factors that influence outcome when learning to program. ...

Schools and universities often have to deal with students' misconceptions and stereotypes towards computer science (CS). For example, CS is widely perceived as boring, not interesting and a masculine discipline. To prevent students from forming false ...

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 ...

Modeling and assessing competencies in computer science education is still an up to date topic. Especially regarding object-oriented programming the research data leaves room for further investigations. Based on an existing competency structure model, a ...

The Finnish curriculum reform integrates programming in the National Core Curriculum in the fall 2016. Finland is not the first country in Europe to take programming as a part of the National Core Curriculum; However, Finland is the first country in ...

Parson's problems, in which students solve programming assignments by putting code fragments in the correct order, can be an easy way to start the assignments as there is no need to write code or struggle with the syntax. In this paper, we report ...

We investigate how to create a rubric that can be used to give feedback on code quality to students in introductory programming courses. Based on an existing model of code quality and a set of preliminary design rules, we constructed a rubric and put it ...

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and it is widely taught as a part of computing degrees. Machine learning is an umbrella concept for a wide range of different algorithms and approaches, and it is often considered a difficult subject to ...

Web Science is an emerging subject, which was formally defined in 2006. Since the inception of Web Science, a number of Web Science taught programs have emerged across the world. Despite this, there are still currently very few attempts to provide a ...

In this study, we examine the "test mode effect" in CS1 exam using the Rainfall problem. The participants started working with pen and paper, after which they had access to a computer, and they could rework their solution with a help of a test suite ...

Today in Germany a variety of programs exist which teach programming skills to students in the age group of 8 to 12 years. These programs focus on stimulating the students' interest in science and technology. In comparison to other European countries ...

We describe a study conducted in a Nigerian university for 142 third-year undergraduate students to evaluate how MobileEdu, a mobile learning application, supports the learning outcomes of the students. The research data for the investigation were ...

Many countries all over the world are in the process of introducing programming in their K-9 curricula. Due to recent changes in the Finnish curriculum there is a large need to train teachers in teaching programming at primary school level. In this ...

Automatic assessment has become a widely used technique in programming courses. Even though modern techniques can practically ensure functional correctness of student solutions, it is less clear how to promote quality interaction between students and ...