Publications and Research

Over 20 years of Computer Science Education Research and the biggest study funded by NSF in CS education, our methods and tools are well-studied and have been used as models by many in the industry. Here’s a small sample of our peer-reviewed and published research.

Jeffrey Bush and Susan Miller. 2017. “Analysis of Associations between Motivation and Previous Computer Science Experience, Gender, Ethnicity and Privilege as Observed in a Large Scale Survey of Middle School Students”. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 705–705.

Ashok R Basawapatna, AlexanderRepenning, KyuHanKoh, and Hilarie Nickerson. 2013. “The zones of proximal flow: guiding students through a space of computational thinking skills and challenges”. In Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research. 67–74.

Repenning, "Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programing in AgentSheets," Journal of Visual Languages and Sentient Systems, vol. 3, p. 24, 2017.

Repenning, D. C. Webb, K. H. Koh, H. Nickerson, S. B. Miller, C. Brand, et al., "Scalable Game Design: A Strategy to Bring Systemic Computer Science Education to Schools through Game Design and Simulation Creation," Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), vol. 15, pp. 1-31, 2015.

Repenning, A., Webb, D. C., Brand, C., et al. “Beyond Minecraft: Facilitating Computational Thinking through Modeling and Programming in 3D”. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 34, 3 (May-June 2014), 68-71.

Repenning, A. Conversational programming: exploring interactive program analysis. In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on new ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software (Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, 2013). ACM, 63-74.

Repenning, A., Smith, C., Owen, R. & Repenning, N. (2012). AgentCubes: Enabling 3D Creativity by Addressing Cognitive and Affective Programming Challenges. In T. Amiel & B. Wilson (Eds.), Proceedings of EdMedia 2012--World Conference on Educational Media and Technology (pp. 2762-2771). Denver, Colorado, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Koh, Kyu Han & Repenning, Alexander & Nickerson, Hilarie & Endo, Yasko & Motter, Pate. (2013). Will it stick?: exploring the sustainability of computational thinking education through game design. Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education 597-602.

Ashok Basawapatna, Alexander Repenning, Mark Savignano, Josiane Manera, Nora Escherle, and Lorenzo Repenning. 2018. “Is drawing video game characters in an hour of code activity a waste of time?”. In Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM conference on innovation and technology in Computer Science Education. 93–98. https://wiki.computationalthinkingfoundation.org/wiki/images/d/dd/Iticse18main-id204-p.pdf

Hilarie Nickerson, Catharine Brand, and Alexander Repenning. 2015. “Grounding computational thinking skill acquisition through contextualized instruction”. In Proceedings of the eleventh annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research. 207–216.

A. Repenning A. Making Programming Accessible and Exciting. IEEE COMPUTER 46(6): 78-81, Jun 2013. Invited

Repenning, A., “Programming Goes Back to School”, Communications of the ACM (May 2012), 55, 5, pp. 38-40, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. Invited , rated popular and (online version only) including embedded video.

Repenning, A., Ioannidou, A., Computational Thinking for Game Design, Special Issue on Computational Thinking, The Voice of K-12 Computer Science Education and its Educators (Voice), (May 2011), Computer Science Teacher Association (CSTA), 4-5.

Ioannidou, A., Repenning, A., Webb, D., Keyser, D., Luhn, L. and Daetwyler, C. Mr. Vetro: A Collective Simulation for teaching health science. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, ijCSCL, 5 (Feb. 2010), International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), 141-166.

Repenning, A., Ioannidou, A., Dättwyler, C., Luhn, L. and Repenning, N. Mr. Vetro: Assessing a Collective Simulation Framework. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, JILR, 21 (4 2010), Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Chesapeake, VA, 515-537.

Ashok Basawapatna, K. H. K., Alexander Repenning, David C. Webb, Krista Sekeres Marshall. (2011). Recognizing Computational Thinking Patterns. Paper presented at the The 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).