I was a guest editor with Briana B. Morrison for a special issue of Computer Science Education on the topic “Advancing Theory about the Novice Programmer.” We had so many high quality submissions that it ended up being a double issue of exciting, current, and theory-driven research. In our guest editorial, we give a 1-paragraph summary of each of the six articles.

1. Concepts before Coding: Non-Programming Interactives to Advance Learning of Introductory Programming Concepts in Middle School by Grover, Jackiw and Lundh
2. Teaching Computer Programming with PRIMM: A Sociocultural Perspective by Sentance, Waite and Kallia
3. Block-based versus Text-based Programming Environments on Novice Student Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis Study by Xu, Ritzhaupt, Tian and Umapathy
4. A Theory of Instruction for Introductory Programming Skills by Xie, Loksa, Nelson, Davidson, Dong, Kwik, Tan, Hwa, Li and Ko
5. CS1: How Will They Do? How Can We Help? A Decade of Research and Practice by Quille and Bergin
6. A Systematic Literature Review of Student Engagement in Software Visualization: A Theoretical Perspective by Al-Sakkaf, Omar and Ahmad

I don’t have permission to reprint the editorial here, but it is available for free on the journal’s website.

Margulieux, L. E., & Morrison, B. B. (Eds.). (2019). Special Issue: Advancing Theory about the Novice Programmer. Computer Science Education. 29(2-3), 103-308.

For more information about the article summary series or more article summary posts, visit the article summary series introduction.