Please note that I a am no longer actually conducting research to focus primarily on teaching.
My primary interest in research is to provide mentoring opportunities to undergraduate students. I have collaborated closely with undergraduates on all of my research projects.
Programming Completion Puzzles
I am currently researching methods to support independent learning of programming concepts for middle school kids. For my dissertation I developed programming completion problems/puzzles in Looking Glass. If you are interesting in trying out this programming puzzles on your own, download Puzzle Looking Glass.
A programming completion puzzle in the novice programming environment, Looking Glass.
Blocks-Based Programming Assessments
I am also currently working on developing a programming assessment to evaluate students who learn programming with blocks-based languages, like Alice, Scratch, or Looking Glass.
Sample questions from my blocks-based programming assessment.
Automatically Generated Programming Tutorials
Prior to investigating the code puzzles, I explored using automatically generated tutorials to also help middle school children learn programming independently.
An automatically generated tutorial in Looking Glass.