The field of Computing Education Research (CER) produces important insights into learning and notable interventions, yet due to the research/practice divide these do not have the desired impact on learners or practitioners. Even within CER, Computing Education (CE) learning theories have limited influence on learning designs due to the theory/design divide, which is unfortunate given that the goal of CER is to impact learners and broaden access to computation.

There is a lack of an overarching model defining CER as a unified field and providing a framework for discussion. While there is discussion around many of the core activities and practices in CER, we have yet to come across a holistic characterisation. We introduce a model of Translational Computing Education Research (TCER) that helps to understand and discuss CER as a field, bridge the divides and provide internal structure, while also making the field more approachable for interdisciplinary and non-academic collaborators. In our TCER model, theory and design are equally important but weighted differently depending on an activity’s position along the research/practice continuum.

In addition to the future exploration and exploitation of the presented TCER model, we propose further characterising CER as a field, applying the TCER model to understand past and contemporary CER, applying the model to address current challenges in CER, imagining what the field can become, as well as exploring the potential for translational research programmes to maximise the broader impact of computing education research.

• King's Scroll

• Mobile Companion App

We introduce the Explorotron Visual Studio Code extension for guided and independent code exploration and learning. Explorotron is a continuation of earlier work carried out to explore how we can enable small organisations with limited resources to provide pedagogically sound learning experiences in programming. We situate Explorotron in the field of Computing Education Research (CER) and envision it to initiate a discussion around different topics, including how to balance the optimisation between the researcher-student-teacher trifecta that is inherent in CER, how to ethically and responsibly use large language models (LLMs) in the independent learning and exploration by students, and how to define better learning sessions over coding content that students obtained on their own. We further reflect on the question raised by Begel and Ko whether technology should structure learning for learners or whether learners should be taught how to structure their own independent learning outside of the classroom.

• VS Code Marketplace

• Source

Students sometimes manage to produce functionally correct program code while having a fragile understanding of the related learning goals. Such unproductive success could be intercepted by an educator who asks questions that target the structure and evaluation of the student’s program using the constructs and identifiers in the code. We provide a tool that automatically generates multiple-choice questions of seven different types for this purpose. We integrated these questions into a web-based program writing exercises, which we also publish as a part of this work, and successfully used them on an introductory programming course. In our pilot evaluation of the tool, we found that the students who answer these questions repeatedly incorrectly are likely to drop out, have more challenges while writing a program, and resort to tinkering behavior.