This study proposes an Ontology for Computer Science (CS) students' profiles. This Student model will represent information about the CS student and will be created by extracting constructs and variables from applied questionnaires. The literature presents several instruments that analyze the student's profile and performance in STEM and Computer Science. Some questionnaires were used to determine the profile of CS students to extract constructs and variables such as (a) Sociodemographic and economical; (b) Personality Type; c) Academic performance in secondary education; d) Learning experiences; f) Attitudes toward Programming; g) Science Motivation. h) Parental/Social Support. Our overarching research question of this study is to answer: How can we build an ontology for the computer science student profile that identifies the main factors that motivated him/her to choose a course in this area? This study will build the proposed ontology using the Ontology Development 101 methodology. The proposed ontology will be validated with real-world data and intended to develop case studies to administer internationally validated questionnaires to university students enrolled in Computer Science Major-related courses in public universities. The expected results are to know and trace the profile of CS students (female and male) since secondary education to promote better actions that increase the interest of secondary school students, mainly girls, in the IT area. Thus, this work intends to build an Ontology of CS Students as part of a recommendation system that will make suggestions for actions that encourage more students to pursue a career in Computer Science and then, be able to increase the supply of IT professionals in the market: workforce, especially women.

One of the reasons for failure in introductory programming subjects may be related to the study methods used by students. The teacher awareness of study attitudes and behaviours may help teachers to provide useful recommendations for their students and also to incorporate them into their strategic pedagogical activities in order to meet students’ study preferences. Therefore, in this study the main objective was to know more about the student’s study methods, namely how, when, how much and with which support materials they study. In this study we used two samples in which the results were slightly different. One of the samples seemed to be more self-regulated in the sense that it seeks more diversified methods and strategies when doubts and difficulties occur and studying more in function of their difficulties. Although it was not possible to obtain correlations in relation to the study methods used and the final results obtained in programming, we could recognize some study attitudes and behaviour trends in students that had better and worse results.

This Innovative Practice Work in Full Paper describes the use of a tool aimed to support the teacher's decisions and interventions within the scope of programming classes. As computers play an increasingly important role in our lives, the demand for programmers is growing. In addition to the intrinsic difficulties of programming, teachers must also deal with the vast diversity of students found in their classes. Close monitoring by teachers has been identified as a critical factor for student's success. However, it may be difficult for teachers to stay up-to-date at any moment about each of their students' overall progress and capabilities. For this purpose, we have developed a tool that collects snapshots of the students' source code whenever they compile it. The snapshots are processed, and a series of visualizations and aggregated data is made immediately available for teachers. Since teachers can't be permanently looking at the system, we have also developed an automatic notification system, based on cognitive theories of selective attention, which will notify teachers about numerous relevant aspects concerning their students' performance. We present the results of a field experiment, which confirms that the tool indeed allows teachers to have a deeper insight into their students' performance and progress, enabling them to make more grounded interventions.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a study on student's motivation towards learning to program. Motivation is a key factor in learning. Hence, stimulating student motivation strategies should be present in any pedagogical approach. This is particularly true in courses where a very active student attitude is fundamental. Introductory programming courses in higher education are a good example, which are known to be difficult for many students. To be successful students need to be motivated, as effort and commitment are necessary to overcome the difficulties many of them experience. In our study we analyzed several motivational aspects separately and then we correlated that information with the marks students obtained in introductory programming courses. We used two questionnaires. The Course Interest Survey (CIS) and the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS). We could find some interesting correlations that confirm the importance of different motivational aspects to learning. We found other issues that demand more investigation, in order to create the best context to promote student motivation and learning.

The difficulties faced by students and teachers in learning and teaching introductory programming has been a research issue over the years. Demotivation is common in many novice programming students, who are not able to cope with the natural difficulties associated to programming learning. It is up to the teacher to find strategies to help students and keep them motivated during the course. The objective of our research was to know more about the pedagogical and motivational strategies used by teachers in the author's institutions to promote programming student's motivation and learning. Some time ago we interviewed a few Portuguese teachers with diversified experiences in programming teaching. Recently we had the opportunity to do the same kind of research with Professors from Macao (China). The problems identified, the teachers' motivation to teach programming, the educational and motivational strategies and the student-teacher relationship were specifically addressed. This paper describes the research done, stressing the Macanese teacher's views and relating them with the views previously expressed by their Portuguese colleagues.

MOOC platforms are Web-based learning environments which allow a global participation on a large scale and with free access. The paradigm presents itself as a new teaching trend, changing the way education can be offered and funded worldwide. Many institutions are now investing in this teaching mode. However, since it is a web-based tool, the connection performance can impact both the way learning is experienced by the student as well as the operation of the platform. The “Quality of Experience” (QoE) concept has been widely used to refer to how users describe a service they have used while the “Quality of Service” (QoS) concept deals with the technical performance parameters that are associated with the connection quality. This paper starts the process of developing a systematic mapping around MOOC platforms, and QoS and QoE concepts, aiming to provide an overview of the current state of research on these issues.

Unemployment has been a major concern in recent years. This is particular true for young people and in the case of Portugal for youngsters with a Higher Education degree. In this paper we describe the program “Acertar o Rumo”, a two years program to reconvert unemployed graduates in Engineering and Exact and Natural Science in experienced Java programmers. Particularly, we focus on the Programming courses of the program, where the two main programming paradigms, the procedural and the object-oriented, as well as principles and technologies for developing enterprise systems were taught. We describe the main methodologies and approaches followed and report the very positive results obtained with the first edition of the program till now. We finish the paper by proposing some recommendations and improvements for further editions.

Learning computer programming is not simple for many students. They have to develop several complex skills to be able to understand programs and, more important, to create programs that solve problems. This means it is important that students have a high motivation level, so that they engage in that work and do not get frustrated with the natural errors they will make in this process. Digital games are often used in educational contexts to attract and retain students. In literature and on the web, we can find many games related strategies that aim to support learning in introductory computer programming courses. One of these strategies is the using games approach: asking students to play games that include problems that must be solved in order to progress. This paper presents a list of 40 games classified by type and highlights the skills and topics supported by them. We hope this work helps teachers to choose games as part of their teaching strategies, as alternative or complementary exercises to their students.

Building written feedback, pedagogically sound, standardized and flexible enough to accommodate students who may be in different stages and learning curves is a complex and laborious task. In this paper, we describe a multinational case study involving diverse types of pedagogical feedback provided to Portuguese and Brazilian novice programming students. Programming errors, especially logical ones, can be used as a consistent metric for assessing learning. The research done looks for an innovative form to define content of several types of feedback. It also aims to create an efficient method for the discovery and mapping of students' logical programming errors. The results obtained so far using this approach are presented and analyzed.

The Schoolsenses@Internet project explores the creation of georeferenced multisensory information in elementary schools collaborative contexts to promote educational success with a deeper learning at this educational level. Workshops with teachers and children in real contexts play an important role in the design and validation of project tools. This paper reports on the design process of one of these tools to support the use and the creation of georeferenced multisensory simulations and models in elementary education contexts.

Haptic devices are getting very cheap which makes it possible to use them more broadly. However the lack of software that supports these devices is still quite high. We present a prototype of an authoring system, based on Dragon pathways, which allows users to take advantage of such devices, and build their own simulations and activities using an iconic language and mainly drag and drop techniques.

SimulCol is an asynchronous collaborative continuous modeling tool for generic systems allowing learners spread in anytime and anywhere to develop models in group. Model building can be abridged if done in group. However, many times, students are not physically together. Still they need to work collectively. That is what SimulCol provides, along with teacher tools to follow studentspsila work.

A study conducted at the Universidade de Coimbra with first year students of programming classes of the Electrical Engineering and Computers Degree is described. The main objective of the study was to investigate how students learn the crucial aspect of control structures in programming, namely repetition structures, and if there are patterns of learning behavior that emerge.

In this paper we describe the main approach used in our institutions' basic programming courses. The difficulties we experienced in these courses led us to develop tools that, in our view, help students. We created and use animation-based algorithm tools, program simulation tools and problem solving collaboration support tools. The integration of these tools, plus the addition of some other new approaches, gives us a powerful environment that provides a higher level of support to our students.