A new emphasis & pedagogy for a CS1 course
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
Teaching computer science: a problem solving approach that works
ACM SIGCUE Outlook - Special issue: selected papers from NECC '96
Alice: a 3-D tool for introductory programming concepts
CCSC '00 Proceedings of the fifth annual CCSC northeastern conference on The journal of computing in small colleges
Do we really teach abstraction?
Proceedings of the thirty-second SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer Science Education
What should we teach in an introductory programming course?
SIGCSE '74 Proceedings of the fourth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
Introducing computer science fundamentals before programming
FIE '97 Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference,1997. on 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change. - Volume 01
ITiCSE '09 Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Communications of the ACM - Scratch Programming for All
Can algotutor change attitudes toward algorithms
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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Often when designing an educational tool, the focus is primarily on how well the tool helps the student learn a concept. However, always in educational research there is an underlying desire to determine what factors actually influence student learning. This is because an understanding of these factors can lead to the design of more effective tools/techniques. The focus of our research has been on developing a tool to help students learn algorithm design. The ability to design an algorithm for a given problem is one of the most important, and unfortunately one of the most difficult to accomplish, learning outcomes of computer science courses. It has previously been shown [13] that students who use AlgoTutor, a Web-based algorithm development tutor, are significantly more likely to think that algorithm design prior to coding is important and to have confidence in their own ability to design an algorithm. From follow up studies, we have found that students who have used AlgoTutor in introductory computer science classes are not only more confident in their ability to design an algorithm, but also more likely to design a correct algorithm than those who have not used AlgoTutor. Additionally, we show that the course management utility for the AlgoTutor system can be used to investigate questions about factors that influence student learning. As an example we investigate the question, "how much is too much help and how much is not enough help if a student is having difficulty solving a problem?"