Juha Sorva

What do I do?

I am a programming teacher and a computing education researcher. Computing education research (CER) is a branch of discipline-based education research. (No, it doesn't involve raps across the knuckles.)

My background is in computer science. In recent years, I have been drawn towards research on education, especially computing education research. I draw on theories of education and psychology as I teach and as I do research on the learning and teaching of programming.

In my spare time, I enjoy pinches of salt, calling kettles black, and writing footnotes.

Research

My research interests within CER include: the learning and teaching of introductory programming (especially at the university level), learners' understandings of programming concepts, cognitive approaches to CER, program visualization, phenomenography, and learning environments and tools.

For a list of my publications, please see my Google Scholar profile. A separate page contains open-access links to those of my papers that have been published in the ACM Digital Library. (Please notify me if you experience problems with those.)

I am part of the Learning + Technology research group.

Some current and recent projects

• redesigning the introductory computer programming curriculum at Aalto; implementing a new introductory course (in Finnish), which is also available to students outside of Aalto
• co-teaching CSE-E5280 Learning Technologies
• my 2012 doctoral thesis: Visual Program Simulation in Introductory Programming Education (physical copies available on request)
• the UUhistle program visualization tool for beginner Python programmers