Computational Thinking (CT) has been described as an essential skill which everyone should learn and can therefore include in their skill set. Seymour Papert [1] is credited as concretising Computational Thinking in 1980 but since Wing [2] popularised the term in 2006 and brought it to the international community's attention, more and more research has been conducted on CT in education. The aim of this systematic literary review is to give educators and education researchers an overview of what work has been carried out in the domain, as well as potential gaps and opportunities that still exist.

It is well documented, and has been the topic of much research, that Computer Science courses tend to have higher than average drop out rates at third level, particularly so for students advancing from first year to second year. This is a problem that needs to be addressed with urgency but also caution. The required number of Computer Science graduates is growing every year but the number of graduates is not meeting this demand and one way that this problem can be alleviated is to encourage students, at an early age, towards studying Computer Science courses.This paper presents a systematic literature review that examines the role of visual and textual programming languages when learning to program, particularly as a first programming language. The approach is systematic, in that a structured search of electronic resources has been conducted, and the results are presented and quantitatively analysed. This study will provide insight into whether or not the current approaches to teaching young learners programming are viable, and examines what we can do to increase the interest and retention of these students as they progress through their education.

Digital Watermarking is an ever increasing and important discipline, especially in the modern electronically-driven world. Watermarking aims to embed a piece of information into digital documents which their owner can use to prove that the document is theirs, at a later stage. In this paper, performance analysis of watermarking schemes is performed on white noise sequences and chaotic sequences for the purpose of watermark generation. Pseudorandom sequences are compared with chaotic sequences generated from the chaotic skew tent map. In particular, analysis is performed on highpass signals generated from both these watermark generation schemes, along with analysis on lowpass watermarks and white noise watermarks. This analysis focuses on the watermarked images after they have been subjected to common image distortion attacks. It is shown that signals generated from highpass chaotic signals have superior performance than highpass noise signals, in the presence of such attacks. It is also shown that watermarks generated from lowpass chaotic signals have superior performance over the other signal types analysed.

In this paper we investigate the limits on optical detection of noisy watermarks that use a chaotic function, the logistic difference equation, in the watermark generation scheme. By varying the function seed, different chaotic sequences exhibiting lowpass and highpass characteristics, can be obtained for the same function, offering an added security advantage over watermarks generated using pseudorandom sequences. Watermark Detection is the process of determining whether an image is watermarked with a certain watermark. In this paper, we model and investigate an optical correlator suitable for watermark detection for certain classes of high-pass or low-pass watermarks. Once in the public domain a watermarked image may be subjected to noise and other attacks, deliberate and unintentional. Additionally, an optical correlator system will also be subject to shot noise. The effects of shot noise on optically transmitted watermarks are modeled in this paper and we examine how the watermark detection scheme performs in such situations. We quantify the degree of noise that may be present in the watermark detection scheme in order to obtain reliable detection or rejection of a watermark using an optical-correlator.

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