Constructivism is a theory of learning which claims that students construct knowledge rather than merely receive and store knowledge transmitted by the teacher. Constructivism has been extremely influential 'in science and mathematics education, but not in computer science education (CSE). This paper surveys constructivism inthe context of CSE, and shows how the theory can supply a theoretical basis for debating issues and evaluating proposals.',

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Summary. A temporal logic is defined which contains both linear and branching operators. The underlying model is the tree of all possible computations. The following metatheoretical results are proven: 1) an exponential decision procedure for satisfiability; 2)a finite model property; 3)the completeness of an axiomatization.

We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.

Computer science (CS) activities for young students are widely used, particularly visual programming environments. We investigated the use of the Scratch environment for teaching CS concepts to middle school students. In a previous article [Meerbaum-Salant et al. 2013], we reported on the extent to which the CS concepts were successfully learned. In this article, we look at the transition from studying CS with the visual Scratch environment in middle school to studying CS with a professional textual programming language (C# or Java) in secondary school. We found that the programming knowledge and experience of students who had learned Scratch greatly facilitated learning the more advanced material in secondary school: less time was needed to learn new topics, there were fewer learning difficulties, and they achieved higher cognitive levels of understanding of most concepts (although at the end of the teaching process, there were no significant differences in achievements compared to students who had not studied Scratch). Furthermore, there was increased enrollment in CS classes, and students were observed to display higher levels of motivation and self-efficacy. This research justifies teaching CS in general and visual programming in particular in middle schools.