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The boom of research topics such as AI literacy and explainable AI (XAI) intensified political discussions about the right for meaningful explanations of the logic involved leave no doubt about the necessity of AI education. However, technologies that we find in our every lives often hide architectural aspects to make their benefits accessible for everyone. Additionally, performance seems to trade-off for explainability, leading to a black-box system not understandable for users and sometimes even experts. To address this issue this paper introduces a workshop framework designed to enhance interactions with large language models (LLMs) - in particular ChatGPT. With emphasis on observation, analysis and hands-on interaction, the workshop framework pursues three different goals: (1) as an event for scientific research, (2) as a learning event and (3) as science communication work to integrate the public more closely into research. Pre-post-test data suggests a shift in participants' interaction patterns when using ChatGPT. Participants not only questioned the AI's responses but also reflected on their own understanding, asking follow-up questions or offering suggestions on how to better explain concepts to the AI.

Programming, when practised in an epistemic sense, can be used as a means of gaining insight into areas of personal interest that extend beyond the programming domain itself, e.g. by analysing data or running a simulation. However, novice programmers need support in conducting such personal epistemic programming projects. This paper reports on an eye-tracking study, aimed at identifying different approaches to using worked examples in this context. The study, conducted with 26 participants from K-12 using SMI REDn eye trackers, aims to uncover different types of (heuristic and presumably epistemic) approaches. In this context, we present an approach to clustering and aggregating scan paths through using dynamic time warping. The results show five different clusters with different behaviours: While some participants had several linear reading phases in the worked example, others focused more on parts that were necessary for their individual efforts. This could be an indication of epistemic programming.

Background and Context. One goal of K-12 computing education is to teach computational concepts that support learners in responsibly and competently using and evaluating digital technologies. However, recent research indicates that students struggle to make use of such concepts in everyday life. Additionally, research shows that people develop powerlessness and resignation about data-driven technologies, leading to passive user roles. This raises the question of how to support students’ empowerment in navigating and shaping the digital world.

K-12 computing education research is a rapidly growing field of research, both driven by and driving the implementation of computing as a school and extra-curricular subject globally. Within discipline-based education research, it is a new and emerging field, drawing on fields such as mathematics and science education research for inspiration and theoretical bases. The urgency around investigating effective teaching and learning in computing in school alongside broadening participation has led to much of the field being focused on empirical research. Less attention has been paid to the underlying philosophical assumptions informing the discipline, which might include a critical examination of the rationale for K-12 computing education, its goals and perspectives, and associated inherent values and beliefs. The goals of this research project are to understand the implicit and hidden values, perspectives and goals underpinning computing education at school. This will be achieved through a critical examination of a wide body of literature leading to the development of a categorization and framework.

School students interact with various data-driven applications in their everyday lives. Their motivations and intentions to engage with these technologies in everyday life from a computing perspective are rarely examined. However, this could inform the development of approaches to broadening participation and engagement in K-12 computing education. In this article, we present a questionnaire-based study of students' motivations and implementation intentions to engage with the data in data-driven technologies when interacting with them in everyday life. We surveyed 398 students between the ages of 12 and 16 and used structural equation modeling for analysis to examine students' motivations and intentions, as well as potential differences by gender and age. The study indicates that students have moderate motivations and intentions to engage with the CS-related aspects of data-driven technologies. The results suggest that older students are less curious about explanations for data-driven technologies than younger students, but gender does not play a significant role.

Programming nowadays has become an important tool in various scientific fields, not only in terms of software engineering but also for knowledge acquisition. In this regard, we analyze epistemic programming as an interdisciplinary, cognitive perspective on programming, enabling programmers to gain insights into individual interests. As a first step towards implementing epistemic programming in computing education, we assess, whether novice programmers can utilize epistemic programming as a means of gaining insights and exploring their interests with the help of a worked example. Therefore, we report on findings from a study, analyzing eye-tracking data, screen recordings, and transcripts from retrospective think-aloud interviews.

We conducted an exploratory study in which participants had to acquire knowledge of unfamiliar application programming interfaces (APIs) in order to complete two programming tasks. Eye tracking was used to monitor participants’ attention throughout the study. We analysed the learning process using the COIL model, which includes three stages: Information Collection, Information Organisation and Solution Testing. Using this model, we describe patterns in the sequences of actions derived from the data. We discuss whether the Solution Testing stage has two distinct functions: constructing the solution and gathering information simultaneously. This would be an exploratory Solution Testing Stage. In addition, the use of eye tracking provided further insight into the API learning process.

The disciplinary identity as a computer science student has recently received increasing attention as a well-developed subject identity can help with increasing retention, interest, and motivation. Besides, identity theory can serve as an analytical lens for issues around diversity. However, identity is also often perceived as a vague, overused concept with a variety of theories to build upon. In addition, connections to other topics, such as computer science conceptions, remain unclear and there seems to be little intra-disciplinary exchange about the concept. This article, therefore, attempts to provide a starting point by presenting a so far missing systematic literature review of identity in Computing Education Research (CER). We analyzed a corpus of 41 articles published since 2005 with a focus on the variety of identity theories that are used, the reasons for using them, and the overall theoretical framing of the concept in the CER literature up to this point. We use content analysis with both inductive and deductive coding to derive categories from the corpus to answer our research questions. The results show that there is less variety in the theories than originally expected, most publications refer to the theory of “Communities of Practice”. The reasons for employing identity theory are also rather canonical, in particular, there is only little theoretical development of the theories within CER and also only little empirical work. Finally, we also present an extended version of a computing identity that can be theoretically derived from the work in our corpus.

The identity or self-concept of computer scientists has received increasing attention in the computing education research (CER) literature in recent years. Identity is often considered relevant both for initially choosing a path of study and subsequent retention. It is therefore also considered highly relevant for the questions of how to reduce drop-out rates and broadening participation of currently underrepresented groups in computing in higher education. However, as more and more students have eligible or mandatory computing education in their K-12 years, identity may become relevant in this area as well.

This working group asserts that Program Comprehension (PC) plays a critical part in the writing process. For example, this abstract is written from a basic draft that we have edited and revised until it clearly presents our idea. Similarly, a program is written in an incremental manner, with each step being tested, debugged and extended until the program achieves its goal. Novice programmers should develop their program comprehension as they learn to code, so that they are able to read and reason about code while they are writing it. To foster such competencies our group has identified two main goals: (1) to collect and define learning activities that explicitly cover key components of program comprehension and (2) to define possible learning trajectories that will guide teachers using those learning activities in their CS0/CS1 or K-12 courses.

Innovative and traditional learning designs like workplace-integrated learning in Industry 4.0, Computer Science Education (CSE) on higher and secondary level and Engineering Education require formative as well as summative approaches of evaluation for their further development or refinement. Educational evaluation of CSE learning scenarios has to take into account different perspectives, e.g. the learning design and especially the competence development processes of the involved stakeholders like learners and teachers. In this paper we discuss research on competence development in the context of CSE and engineering education and the possible support this research might obtain from relying on a theory-grounded research framework. The main contribution of the article is the explication of such a framework, which we have developed and refined based on an analysis of informatics processes. We also present examples where the framework can be used to support research and development of learning and teaching innovations.

Code reading is an important skill in programming. Inspired by the linearity that people exhibit while natural language text reading, we designed local and global gaze-based measures to characterize linearity (left-to-right and top-to-bottom) in reading source code. Unlike natural language text, source code is executable and requires a specific reading approach. To validate these measures, we compared the eye movements of novice and expert programmers who were asked to read and comprehend short snippets of natural language text and Java programs. Our results show that novices read source code less linearly than natural language text. Moreover, experts read code less linearly than novices. These findings indicate that there are specific differences between reading natural language and source code, and suggest that non-linear reading skills increase with expertise. We discuss the implications for practitioners and educators.

While knowledge about reading behavior in natural-language text is abundant, little is known about the visual attention distribution when reading source code of computer programs. Yet, this knowledge is important for teaching programming skills as well as designing IDEs and programming languages. We conducted a study in which 15 programmers with various expertise read short source codes and recorded their eye movements. In order to study attention distribution on code elements, we introduced the following procedure: First we (pre)-processed the eye movement data using log-transformation. Taking into account the word lengths, we then analyzed the time spent on different lexical elements. It shows that most attention is oriented towards understanding of identifiers, operators, keywords and literals, relatively little reading time is spent on separators. We further inspected the attention on keywords and provide a description of the gaze on these primary building blocks for any formal language. The analysis indicates that approaches from research on natural-language text reading can be applied to source code as well, however not without review.

The methodology of eye tracking has been gradually making its way into various fields of science, assisted by the diminishing cost of the associated technology. In an international collaboration to open up the prospect of eye movement research for programming educators, we present a case study on program comprehension and preliminary analyses together with some useful tools.

This paper is the second part of an empirical comparison of objects-first vs. objects-later. Here we focus on the role of the emotional climate, connected to the different approaches. The study was carefully designed to align the two approaches so that the comparison is focused on the main difference; that is the different sequence in which topics are taught: object oriented topics from the beginning or not.

This article reports on an experiment undertaken in order to evaluate the effect of a program visualization tool for helping students to better understand the dynamics of object-oriented programs. The concrete tool used was BlueJ’s debugger and object inspector. The study was done as a control-group experiment in an introductory programming course. The results of the experiment show that the students who used BlueJ’s debugger did not perform statistically significantly better than the students not using it; both groups profited about the same amount from the exercises given in the experiment. We discuss possible reasons for and implications of this result.

In this paper, results of an empirical comparison of objects-first vs. objects-later are presented and discussed. The study was carefully designed to align the two approaches so that the comparison is focused on the main difference between the two approaches; that is the different sequence in which topics are taught: object oriented topics from the beginning or not.

Recently, the importance of computer science education in secondary schools has been coming more and more into focus. Students' interests and motivation to pursue a career in CS related fields are highly influenced by school. Also beliefs in the nature of CS are influenced, and necessary foundations in knowledge and skills are built. However, a major problem is the gap between information and communication technologies (ICT) and computer science (CS). Often pupils have only experiences in ICT, and therefore develop inadequate beliefs about CS. We propose educational standards for CS in lower high school in order to bridge ICT and CS.

In this paper, the Block Model, an educational model of program comprehension, is introduced. Its use for planning and analyzing lessons on algorithms is evaluated in a qualitative study with prospective computer science teachers. In addition, the background of the model, its use in computer science education research and for developing competence models is discussed.

What kind of IT key qualifications do we have to teach in order to lessen the digital divide between educated and uneducated IT users, and to enable students who live in an IT-rich world to gain insights into the underlying science?

In which way do computing experiences shape attitudes towards computer science? Why do they foster some students' commitment to the subject while they deter others? By using a qualitative research approach we observed that computing experiences have impacts on several dimensions: They affect the self-image with regard to computing, the world-image with regard to conceptions of the subject, and habits in computing. We determined different perceptions of computing (summarized as: use, professional use and design), which together with attitudes (attributions and concepts) of the field enable or inhibit pathways into the field.

In this article, we try to create a general, worldwide picture of teachers' opinion about what should be taught in introductory programming courses. We focus on the debate about restructuring CS1. The study explores what teachers believe is important to teach, what they actually teach, and what students find most difficult (according to their teachers). what is the general approach to teaching (programming language, IDE, object-orientation or not, type of institution), what topics are taught, and what role do the areas that novices find difficult play in introductory programming course.In addition, we explore how these specific topics fit into a larger conceptual classification: Earlier studies of topics taught in introductory programming focuses only on one dimension of a given topic - either relevance or difficulty. In this study, we evaluate each topic regarding three dimensions: relevance, difficulty and the cognitive level (according to Bloom's taxonomy). This allows giving a more faceted picture of teachers' beliefs in teaching introductory programming courses.Furthermore, we assess the role of findings from the eighties in today's teaching: The need to understand five different areas of programming. Are these areas still in focus; are they relevant, and what is the connection to the topics taught - especially object-oriented (OO) topics?A special focus is given on students' understanding of the execution of a (OO) program; one of the five areas. In order to connect the ideas of a notional machine to OO concepts we present a four levelled competence hierarchy for object-interaction.Teachers assessed the area 'understanding the notional machine' as least important. Despite this, they assessed the herachy of object-interaction - meant as basis for a notional machine for the OO-paradigm - as an important aspect.Although teachers stress the importance of teaching general abstract structures, teaching seems to focus on concrete programming issues. A conclusion for further research on teaching OO programming and concerning the hierarchy of object interaction is that teaching is not only a matter of topics, but also a matter of perspective on teaching the topics.

In this paper we present results of an empirical study with about 600 secondary school students from the 11th grade.In the study novices' conceptions of software development, their attitudes towards and self-confidence with computers, as well as their expectations of learning goals and contents of informatics courses were examined.The study indicates that freshmen have different types of expectations concerning informatics. It becomes evident that their expectations depend on prior experiences and attitudes towards computers or technology. Furthermore, they turn out to be gender-specific.The study argues that the importance of computer science education results not only from the technical aspects of informatics but also from its social impacts. Informatics education as part of general education should convey, besides technical skills in programming, a suitable understanding of software development as a means to understand the importance of technology in modern societies.The résumé of the study refers to the relation between informatics education and the expectation freshmen have as to the nature of software development. Some conclusions for teaching informatics are drawn.