Collaborative learning in groups has practical and pedagogical benefits. In software engineering education, the group formation stage can have an important influence on the quality of learning and students' satisfaction with their group. Knowledge of student experiences and preferences regarding group formation can inform course design and hopefully lead to better learning outcomes and student satisfaction. In this paper, we report experiences of group formation in software engineering courses, focusing on students' perspectives. We used surveys administered on three master's level software engineering courses, through which we explored students' prior experiences with group work in educational settings and their perspectives on how groups should be formed. We present results on students' thoughts about who should form groups, what information criteria they would consider as relevant when forming groups, and what kind of group formation strategy they prefer. Our results indicate that students preferred to keep the group formation process in their own hands, that they considered grade ambitions, educational background, and time availability to be important factors to consider, and that they generally preferred the formation strategy already used on the courses they attended. We also discuss how students' prior experiences may have coloured their perceptions of group formation strategies and the ethical dilemmas facing instructors when choosing different strategies. We present points of consideration for teachers who are interested in improving group formation on their software engineering courses.

Background and Context: Struggling with programming assignments while learning to program is a common phenomenon in programming courses around the world. Supporting struggling students is a common theme in Computing Education Research (CER), where a wide variety of support methods have been created and evaluated. An important stream of research here focuses on program repair, where methods for automatically fixing erroneous code are used for supporting students as they debug their code. Work in this area has so far assessed the performance of the methods by evaluating the closeness of the proposed fixes to the original erroneous code. The evaluations have mainly relied on the use of edit distance measures such as the sequence edit distance and there is a lack of research on which distance measure is the most appropriate.

Research into computing and learning how to program has been ongoing for decades. Commonly, this research has been focused on novice learners and the difficulties they encounter, especially during CS1. Cybersecurity is a critical aspect in computing -- as a topic in university education as well as a core skill in the industry. In this study, we investigate how students solve open-ended assignments on a cybersecurity course offered to university students after two years of CS studies. Specifically, we looked at how students perform SQL injection attacks on an web application system, and study to what extent we can characterize the process in which they come up with successful injections. Our results show that there are distinguishable strategies used by individual students who seek to hack the system, where these approaches revolve around exploration and exploitation tactics. We also find evidence of learning due to a more pronounced use of exploitation in a subsequent similar assignment.

Many computer applications receive information about external events and produce responses. Such applications include web server software, many services used via Internet browsers, as well as most graphical user interfaces in devices from mobile phones and home appliances to general-purpose computers and industrial applications. The development of such applications is often called event-driven programming (EDP). Despite the continuously increasing importance of event-driven applications in the modern society, only a little published experimental research has been targeted at teaching and learning EDP. This dissertation addresses this research gap. The dissertation has two major parts, of which the first one addresses understanding EDP. As an introduction, it reflects on the difficulty of defining the term event-driven programming and continues by presenting a mapping review regarding published research on teaching and learning EDP. From there, it proceeds to explore students’ perceptions of concepts such as a button, an event, and an event handler. This discussion is based on three studies that involved questionnaires and exercises for students of two online courses. A few questions included reading program code, and in one exercise, the participants were asked to answer using a concept map. The analysis of these answers revealed fundamental misunderstandings regarding EDP and user interfaces. Based on them, the dissertation offers practical suggestions for improving the teaching practice. The second major part of the dissertation addresses teaching EDP from two perspectives. First, it explores contextualization of teaching EDP and focuses on tools and exercises of an approach called media computation. Second, it presents a prototype of a tool that can be used for visualizing high-level concepts in many online learning materials. This tool supports logging users’ actions, plays well together with version control systems, has a relatively low learning curve for teachers of computer science, as well as is open source and free to use. The tool was evaluated in a small-scale pilot study, which demonstrated its suitability for its intended usage environment.

We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open course in introductory programming as a part of the digital learning material. We make inductive content analysis to research the open-ended text answers we collected. One third of the students struggled to explain their own program code. This estimates possible occurrences of fragile learning at the moment when a student seemingly succeeds in a program writing exercise. Furthermore, we examine correlations between the correctness of the answers with other learning data. Our results indicate that answering properly aligned QLCs correctly has stronger correlation with student success and retention than merely submitting a correct program. Additionally, we present observations on learning event-driven programming to explore QLCs' potential in identifying students' thinking process.

During the past two decades, event-driven programming (EDP) has emerged as a central and almost ubiquitous concept in modern software development: Graphical user interfaces are self-evident in most mobile and web-based applications, as well as in many embedded systems, and they are most often based on reacting to events. To facilitate both teaching practice and research in programming education, this mapping review seeks to give an overview of the related knowledge that is already available in conference papers and journal articles. Starting from early works of the 1990s, we identified 105 papers that address teaching practices, present learning resources, software tools or libraries to support learning, and empirical studies related to EDP. We summarize the publications, their main content, and findings. While most studies focus on bachelor’s level education in universities, there has been substantial work in K-12 level, as well. Few courses address EDP as their main content—rather it is most often integrated with CS1, CS2, or computer graphics courses. The most common programming languages and environments addressed are Java, App Inventor, and Scratch. Moreover, very little of deliberate experimental scientific research has been carried out to explicitly address teaching and learning EDP. Consequently, while so-called experience reports, tool papers, and anecdotal evidence have been published, this theme offers a wide arena for empirical research in the future. At the end of the article, we suggest a number of directions for future research.

The term Confidence Gap refers to the phenomenon of men being more confident in their ability to succeed in their studies and elsewhere. It is an acknowledged phenomenon both in Computer Science as well as STEM subjects at large, likely influencing students' career path choices and selection of study major. In this work, we analyze data from multiple introductory programming courses. We do this by looking at the interaction of (1) students' performance measured in terms of completed assignments, (2) self-reported confidence in the ability to succeed in the programming course, (3) major, and (4) gender. Aligned with prior research, we observe the existence of the Confidence Gap. At the same time, men and women who chose Computer Science as their major are more confident in their ability to succeed in their first programming course than their counterparts in other subjects.

We analyzed three introductory programming MOOCs and four introductory programming courses offered locally in a Finnish university. The course has been offered in all instances with roughly the same content, barring adjustments based on course feedback. We sought to understand how gender interacts with participating in the course in both instances. In particular, we looked at the differences in persistence, confidence, interest in CS, prior experience, and performance between men and women. Overall, we found that men have more prior experience in both instances and have a higher interest in a CS degree. Furthermore, men perform slightly better on the MOOC while there was no significant difference in performance when it came to gender in the local instance. Aligned with prior research, we found a considerable gap in confidence between male and female students in both instances. At the same time, while women are still underrepresented in CS, we observe a considerable increase in women attending the MOOC. Unfortunately, women are also more likely to drop out early on in the MOOC than men.

This article discusses an emerging phenomenon of streaming programming to a live audience who in turn can interact with the streamer. In essence, this means broadcasting the programming environment and typically a web camera feed of the streamer to viewers. Streaming programming bears many similarities with live-streaming playing of video games, which has become extremely popular among gamers over the recent years. In fact, streaming programming often use the same web services as streaming gaming, and the audiences overlap.

Summary Modern online learning management systems (LMSs) support a variety of online learning activities, such as animations, exercises, and other interactive learning materials. However, there are many technical challenges in using the same activities in multiple LMSs because content is typically tightly coupled with one protocol to communicate with the LMS and different LMSs use different protocols for launching activities and receiving grades. This leads to low reusability of learning activities and similar content being developed in multiple places. To overcome these issues, we present Acos, a smart learning content server, which emphasizes the reusability of online learning activities by decoupling the content and existing interoperability protocols. It allows integrating the same learning activities into multiple LMSs using different protocols by providing a uniform interface for learning activities. Adapting this architecture allows instructors to choose activities based on pedagogical goals instead of letting technical restrictions of LMSs dictate the content selection process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A small number of recent studies have suggested that learning is enhanced when the illustrations in instructional materials are designed to appeal to the learners' emotions through the use of color and the personification of key elements. We sought to replicate this emotional design effect in the context of introductory object-oriented programming (OOP). In this preliminary study, a group of freshmen studied a text on objects which was illustrated using anthropomorphic graphics while a control group had access to abstract graphics. We found no significant difference in the groups' scores on a comprehension post-test, but the experimental group spent substantially less time on the task than the control group. Among those participants who had no prior programming experience, the materials inspired by emotional design were perceived as less intelligible and appealing and led to lower self-reported concentration levels. Although this result does not match the pattern of results from earlier studies, it shows that the choice of illustrations in learning materials matters and calls for more research that addresses the limitations of this preliminary study.

The ability to use version control systems is a highly desired skill in the software industry and the need to teach it has been recognized in the literature. Git, and other version control systems, have previously been used by instructors in classrooms to distribute exercises, to facilitate assessment, and as a platform for project collaboration and teamwork. Using version control brings benefits to instructors, e.g. by lowering the need for administrative tasks, as well as to students, e.g. by providing experience with standard software industry tools. We describe how to incrementally present features of Git and incorporate them into the course workflow. We present a case study of running a large (ca. 200 students) course utilizing Git and evaluate the results both from instructor's and learner's point of view. Our evaluation shows, that a distributed version control system can be used successfully to disseminate course materials and facilitate exercise submissions.

Achievement badges are increasingly used to enhance educational systems and they have been shown to affect student behavior in different ways. However, details on best practices and effective concepts to implement badges from a non-technical point of view are scarce. We implemented badges to our learning management system, used them on a large course and collected feedback from students. Based on our experiences, we present recommendations to other educators that plan on using badges.