Software development is cognitively demanding and inherently collaborative, as it requires coordinating efforts across diverse team members to solve complex problems. Communication, coordination, and cooperation are crucial to the success of software development teams. Yet, instructions and guidance on effective collaboration are often overlooked in software engineering education. In my work, I design and develop collaboration modules that teach students to reflect on and regulate their individual and group collaborative processes. These modules are integrated into programming courses to improve students’ awareness of their collaborative behaviors and help them develop strategies to enhance their teamwork.

Affective state, referring to an individual's feeling, can impact students' confidence and retention in CS, particularly for novice programmers. However, little research has been conducted to examine how moments that occur during programming impact students' affective states in real-time. In this pilot study, seven undergraduate students in an introductory block-based programming course completed a programming assignment and were surveyed and interviewed about their experience and self-efficacy as programmers. While programming, students periodically recorded their affective states via a popup in the programming environment. We performed retrospective think-aloud interviews with students afterward, asking them to watch and reflect on recordings of their programming. We subsequently analyzed student interviews using thematic analysis to derive 206 codes. These codes were grouped into three areas that impacted affect: the environment, objective progress, and perceptions during programming. To explore why students responded as they did to moment occurrence, we further categorized students based on four dimensions: programming experience, assignment completion, confidence, and the impact of the programming session on self-efficacy. Our initial results suggest that while certain moments elicit similar affective states among students, the interaction of the aforementioned four dimensions may have a higher impact on novices' affective states during programming. We conclude with recommendations for educators to improve students' affective states during and after programming.

In the field of computer science, cultural assumptions are embedded in programming languages and problem prompts. However, for students studying computer science in a Western country not from a Western culture, these assumptions can create learning barriers. This paper investigates the impact of cultural assumptions on international students studying computer science in a Western country; with a focus on understanding the barriers students face, how they overcome these barriers, and how barriers can be avoided. By performing thematic analysis on semi-structured interviews with 12 international graduate students at North Carolina State University, the authors found six main themes: Barriers, Increased Work, Emotions, Educational Environment, Overcoming Barriers, and Solutions to Barriers. Analyzing these themes provided insight into what barriers international students face and how they can be alleviated. The most common suggestions participants gave for alleviating barriers were more discussions around problem statements. By shedding light on this topic, the authors hope to inform computer science educators and researchers on the importance of creating inclusive and culturally relevant learning environments that accommodate the needs of diverse student populations.

Background and Context: Open-ended programming projects encourage novice students to choose and pursue projects based on their own ideas and interests, and are widely used in many introductory programming courses. However, novice programmers encounter challenges exploring and discovering new ideas, implementing their ideas, and applying unfamiliar programming concepts and APIs. Code examples are one of the primary resources students use to apply code usage patterns and learn API knowledge, but little work has investigated the effect of having access to examples on students’ open-ended programming experience.

Software testing is a critical skill for computing students, but learning and practicing testing can be challenging, particularly for beginners. A recent study suggests that a lightweight testing checklist that contains testing strategies and tutorial information could assist students in writing quality tests. However, students expressed a desire for more support in knowing how to test the code/scenario. Moreover, the potential costs and benefits of the testing checklist are not yet examined in a classroom setting. To that end, we improved the checklist by integrating explicit testing strategies to it (ETS Checklist), which provide step-by-step guidance on how to transfer semantic information from instructions to the possible testing scenarios. In this paper, we report our experiences in designing explicit strategies in unit testing, as well as adapting the ETS Checklist as optional tool support in a CS1.5 course. With the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey responses and lab assignment submissions generated by students, we discuss students' engagement with the ETS Checklists. Our results suggest that students who used the checklist intervention had significantly higher quality in their student-authored test code, in terms of code coverage, compared to those who did not, especially for assignments earlier in the course. We also observed students' unawareness of their need for help in writing high-quality tests.