Guido Ivetta, Marcos J Gomez, Sofía Martinelli, Pietro Palombini, M Emilia Echeveste, Nair Carolina Mazzeo, Beatriz Busaniche, Luciana Benotti. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

This paper describes an elementary school intervention to teach a text-based programming language to 10-11 year old students. We compare students with no previous programming experience with students with 3 semesters of experience with a block-based programming language. We analyze students' performance and learning based on detailed logs in an online programming platform and on multiple choice tests. Although both groups have a similar percentage of syntactical errors, the experienced group showed a better performance on exam scores and a lower number of test case errors. These findings suggest that, 10-11 year old students benefit from block-based experience when learning a new text-based programming language.

In this paper we do three things. First, we describe a web-based coding tool that is open-source, publicly available and provides formative feedback and assessment. Second, we compare several metrics on student performance in courses that use the tool versus courses that do not use it when learning to program in Haskell. We find that the dropout rates are significantly lower in those courses that use the tool at two different universities. Finally we apply the technology acceptance model to analyse students perceptions.

This paper describes an introductory Computer Science (CS) Professional Development (PD) course for K-12 teachers in Argentina that integrates pedagogical content knowledge and teacher classroom practice. We analyzed teachers' learning of what CS entails and the implementation of inquirybased programming lessons in their schools. Based on pre and post teachers surveys and classroom observations, we found that most teachers learned about the CS object of study and about fundamental programming concepts such as conditionals, loops, variables, etc. Teachers were more likely to replicate the same activities they experienced during PD workshops in their classrooms than to produce their own. Teachers who had a previous background on CS provided in-depth explanations of CS concepts to their students while other teachers superficially introduced the content knowledge. We describe PD activities and characteristics that could explain teachers' learning and incorporation of programming lessons. Findings imply that a PD program that integrates pedagogical content knowledge and teachers classroom practice can effectively improve inquiry-based CS teaching, but may be insufficient preparation for teachers with no previous background on CS.

This paper describes a school intervention to teach fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts to 3-11 year old students with a multilanguage robot programming platform (using drag and drop, Python and C++ languages) in Argentina. We analyze students' performance and learning process based on multiple choice test and classroom observations. Data show that all students can intuitively learn sequence, conditional, loops and parameters and that girls performed slightly better than boys. Older students can easily combine these concepts to write a program. The multilanguage platform promotes student spontaneous exploration of more sophisticated CS concepts and languages. These findings imply that introducing CS in mandatory schooling from an inquiry based approach is both achievable and beneficial.