We analyze the Computing Education Research (CER) literature to discover what theories, conceptual models and frameworks recent CER builds on. This gives rise to a broad understanding of the theoretical basis of CER that is useful for researchers working in that area, and has the potential to help CER develop its own identity as an independent field of study.Our analysis takes in seven years of publications (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) 308 papers) in three venues that publish long research papers in computing education: the journals ACM Transactions of Computing Education (TOCE) and Computer Science Education (CSEd), and the conference International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER). We looked at the theoretical background works that are used or extended in the papers, not just referred to when describing related work. These background works include theories, conceptual models and frameworks. For each background work we tried to identify the discipline from which it originates, to gain an understanding of how CER relates to its neighboring fields. We also identified theoretical works originating within CER itself, showing that the field is building on its own theoretical works.Our main findings are that there is a great richness of work on which recent CER papers build; there are no prevailing theoretical or technical works that are broadly applied across CER; about half the analyzed papers build on no previous theoretical work, but a considerable share of these are building their own theoretical constructions. We discuss the significance of these findings for the whole field and conclude with some recommendations.

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While computing educators have put plenty of effort into researching and developing programming environments that make it easier for students to create their first programs, these tools often have only little resemblance with the tools used in the industry. We report on a study, where students with no previous programming experience started to program directly using an industry strength programming environment. The programming environment was augmented with logging capability that recorded every keystroke and event within the system, which provided a view on how the novices tackle their first lines of code. Our results show that while at first, the students struggle with syntax -as is typical with learning a new language -no evidence can be found that suggests that learning to use the programming environment is hard. In a two-week period, the students learned to use the basic features of the programming environment such as specific shortcuts. Although we observed students using copy-paste-programming relatively often, most of the pasted code is from their own previous work. Finally, when considering the compilation errors and error distributions, we hypothesize that the errors are a product of three factors; the exercises, the environment, and the data logging granularity.

Scaffolded learning tasks where programs are constructed from predefined code fragments by dragging and dropping them (i.e. Parsons problems) are well suited to mobile touch devices, but quite limited in their applicability. They do not adequately cater for different approaches to constructing a program. After studying solutions to automatically assessed programming exercises, we found out that many different solutions are composed of a relatively small set of mutually similar code lines. Thus, they can be constructed by using the drag-and-drop approach if only it was possible to edit some small parts of the predefined fragments. Based on this, we have designed and implemented a new exercise type for mobile devices that builds on Parsons problems and falls somewhere between their strict scaffolding and full-blown coding exercises. In these exercises, we can gradually fade the scaffolding and allow programs to be constructed more freely so as not to restrict thinking and limit creativity too much while still making sure we are able to deploy them to small-screen mobile devices. In addition to the new concept and the related implementation, we discuss other possibilities of how programming could be practiced on mobile devices. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.