Computing education faces ongoing challenges in engaging diverse students, particularly in introductory programming courses (CS1). While Culturally Responsive Computing (CRC) shows promise in K-12 contexts, little research examines students' perspectives on programming contexts in European higher education. This study investigates 441 CS1 students' preferences for programming task contexts through the lens of funds of identity theory, by analysing how desired contexts align with students' cultural and personal identities, and how gender and prior experience shape these preferences. Our findings reveal that students prefer familiar, practical, and playful contexts where they feel a stronger sense of belonging, while abstract computer science topics significantly disadvantage those with limited experience, particularly female students. We recommend using varied, sequential contexts tailored to experience levels to create more inclusive learning environments.

Functions are both an important and a difficult fundamental concept in introductory programming. This is also true for one particular part of functions, namely the keyword 'return'. This work extended the research on this keyword, including the perspective of terms and explicit focus on misconceptions. We therefore investigated which terms novices typically use when describing code snippets of functions and which difficulties and misconceptions occur in these. We qualitatively analyzed more than 3,000 free-text responses from 617 undergraduate CS1 students using content analysis and thematic analysis. The keyword 'return' itself was rarely mentioned explicitly, unless a 'void' function made use of it. The aspect that the keyword 'return' ends the function was even less often explicitly mentioned. As a new misconception, some students stated that 'return' and 'void' are mutually exclusive. This study revealed overlap with established research as well as one new misconception and two variations of documented misconceptions.

Novice programmers need adequate support to succeed in their courses. This support requires both pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge. These requirements apply to all support staff, e.g., instructors and teaching assistants (TAs). Here we focus on support in the form of answers to student queries about code. We have developed a rubric to assess the quality of answers provided by support staff. In this paper, we present the theoretical framework behind the rubric, the full rubric itself, and two evaluation approaches. First, we evaluated the rubric internally by using it to assess 85 written answers from TAs. From these, we included two sample excerpts and their evaluation using the rubric. Second, our external evaluation included interviews with experts (n=13), which we analyzed using qualitative content analysis. These interviews revealed positive aspects, aspects that could be improved, and other areas of application such as support for reflection.

Much work on instructional videos in computing education focuses on the overall impact and technical aspects of videos, such as motivation and length. However, it might be significant how the underlying pedagogical theory, the didactic basis, determines the delivery of the content. We conducted a randomized experiment to investigate the research question: How does the didactic basis of an instructional video affect code writing performance and self-efficacy given the basic skill of novice programmers? Our data included two cohorts of 133 and 428 CS1 students from the Fall semesters of 2021/22 and 2022/23, respectively. In cohort 1, videos based on language-sensitive teaching led to significantly better results in writing code in object orientation for novices with medium basic skills than videos based on worked examples. This result could not be replicated in cohort 2. We found no effect on novice self-efficacy in either cohort.