About

Dr. Jeremiah Blanchard currently serves as an Instructional Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Florida, where he is also the Director of Computer Engineering and Co-Director of the Engaging Learning Lab. His research focuses on how programming language representation connects to learning, remote digital computing assessment techniques, and educational games in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Dr. Blanchard earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. He has a diverse professional background, having served as the CISE UF Online Director from 2017 to 2021 and previously working as Program Director of Game Development at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, where he spent 10 years teaching courses such as Artificial Intelligence and Networking before moving into administrative roles. His experience also includes work as a freelance game and application developer, as well as living, working, and studying in the Osaka region of Japan. Additionally, Dr. Blanchard has contributed to educational game development projects, including working with the National Flight Academy in Pensacola, Florida, to develop flight simulator scenarios for teaching mathematics, physics, and history to at-risk middle and high school students. He has also collaborated with Design Interactive on CogGauge, a game-based cognitive battery system designed to test brain injuries in space.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Virology
• Pedagogy
• Political Science
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Management
• Multimedia
• World Wide Web
• Knowledge management
• Epistemology
• Software engineering
• Engineering
• Programming language
• Medical education

Selected publications

• Exploring the Impact of Student-Created Review Videos in Two Early Computing Courses

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Student Learning with 3.8 Million Program Traces

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025-10-06 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in particular, these traces reflect the diverse reasoning processes they employ to code, such as exploratory behavior to understand how a programming concept works, re-strategizing in response to bugs, and personalizing stylistic choices. In this work, we explore what can be learned from training language models on such reasoning traces: not just about code, but about coders, and particularly students learning to program. We introduce a dataset of over 3.8 million programming reasoning traces from users of Pencil Code, a free online educational platform used by students to learn simple programming concepts. Compared to models trained only on final programs or synthetically-generated traces, we find that models trained on real traces are stronger at modeling diverse student behavior. Through both behavioral and probing analyses, we also find that many properties of code traces, such as goal backtracking or number of comments, can be predicted from learned representations of the students who write them. Building on this result, we show that we can help students recover from mistakes by steering code generation models to identify a sequence of edits that will results in more correct code while remaining close to the original student's style. Together, our results suggest that many properties of code are properties of individual students and that training on edit traces can lead to models that are more steerable, more predictive of student behavior while programming, and better at generating programs in their final states. Code and data is available at https://github.com/meghabyte/pencilcode-public

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Escaping the CS Dungeon: Modern College Curricula within and Beyond Computing

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Work-in-Progress: SimCoast: Promoting Awareness of Coastal Recession via Gaming

  2024-02-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Dalton Cravens is a computer science major at the University of Florida. Dalton has studied several areas of computer science, but he is primarily focused on cybersecurity with interests in game design. As a member of the SimCoast development team, he has

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Work In Progress: Side-Facing Cameras and Remote Proctoring Integrity

  2024-02-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  I'm of Afro-Caribbean descent and spent most of my life raised on the beautiful islands of St. Kitts and Nevis.I am a double Gator at the University of Florida with a B.S. in Computer Science and am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Human-Center Computing.I aim to conduct research that examines and produces technologies that support learning.This is incredibly important as the pace of technologies often advances without concern for the experiences of people of color.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Board 58: Work in Progress: Iron Coder: An Integrated Development Environment for Embedded Development in Rust

  2024-08-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Iron Coder is an integrated development environment for the development of embedded firmware in the Rust programming language, designed with a focus on ease of use.Embedded devices can serve as hands-on platforms that engage those who use them, and thus play an important role in computing education; however, these same devices also pose a significant barrier to entry due to the wide variety of hardware options, complexity of the toolchains and libraries needed to program them, and enigmatic nature of documentation.Platforms such as Arduino, CircuitPython, and Raspberry Pi, among others, have redefined who is able to work with embedded systems by providing developers with an all-in-one hardware-software system that addresses these challenges.Iron Coder provides this approachability for the Rust language by allowing programmers to graphically define the hardware architecture of their system, assist in generating and validating the associated firmware, linking to related library crates, and providing example code and platform-specific tools for development.The tool's design is oriented towards students and hobbyists, whose primary concerns are ease of use, community support, and a rewarding experience that builds intuition.By decreasing the barrier to entry for embedded Rust, our hope is to increase the language's adoption in academia, industry, and hobby use, resulting in the fulfillment of the language's promise as a safe, robust, and performant platform for embedded systems.With its integration of hardware and software elements, Iron Coder enables the creation of a cohesive, streamlined experience for educators and students in computer engineering fields such as robotics, IoT, and autonomous systems.Beyond this, the platform has potential as a research tool to study the ways in which students learn computer engineering material, especially at the hardware-software interface.Iron Coder is designed to target all major operating systems as well as WebAssembly, with smooth operation even on low-power devices such as single-board computers.Additionally, the tool is designed to continue to grow via community-driven support -the project is open-source and hosted on GitHub, open to public contributions, and will grow as community members add support for additional hardware platforms.Features and documentation that will allow for further community engagement are underway, and the long-term goal of the project is to become a popular and useful tool among open-source development environments, especially in an educational setting.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• WIP: Navigating Unfamiliar Waters: Enhancing Intercultural Understanding and Academic Self-Efficacy Among Computer Science Students in Japan

  2024-10-13

  article

  Global collaborations have expanded the importance of effective cross-cultural communication in engineering disciplines, with self-efficacy playing a crucial role in developing these skills. This work-in-progress innovative practice paper is a quantitative component of a mixed-method exploratory study investigating the experiences of fifteen computing students from the University of Florida who participated in a nine-week summer study abroad program at Kyoto University, Japan, in 2022. The research aimed to assess the enhancement of cross-cultural engineering self-efficacy and the evolution of students' intercultural understanding. Surveys were conducted at the program's inception and conclusion, allowing for a detailed analysis of students' self-perceived academic capabilities and intercultural awareness over time. Preliminary statistical analysis suggests an increase in students' self-efficacy in cross-cultural engineering by the end of the program, highlighting the impact of the study abroad experience on broadening students' perspectives and enhancing their adaptability in intercultural interactions.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Blocks: Lilypad, a Text-Based Visual Code Editor

  2023-10-03

  articleSenior author

  Research on dual-modality and frame-based editors has uncovered strengths and weaknesses to block-oriented approaches to programming and instruction. Building on lessons learned from these editing models, we developed Lilypad, a text-based visual code editor. Lilypad is a modern text-based code editor that generates visual frames around code structures in real-time. Lilypad is designed to simplify the addition of new languages and can operate as a native-code standalone application, plugin, or web-based editor. In this demonstration, we showcase Lilypad's features, design, and real-time use.

  PublisherDOI

• Pseudocode vs. Compile-and-Run Prompts: Comparing Measures of Student Programming Ability in CS1 and CS2

  2023-06-29 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In college-level introductory computer science courses, the programming ability of students is often evaluated using pseudocode responses to prompts. However, this does not necessarily reflect modern programming practice in industry and academia, where developers have access to compilers to test snippets of code on-the-fly. As a result, use of pseudocode prompts may not capture the full gamut of student capabilities due to lack of support tools usually available when writing programs. An assessment environment where students could write, compile, and run code could provide a more comfortable and familiar experience for students that more accurately captures their abilities. Prior work has found improvement in student performance when digital assessments are used instead of paper-based assessments for pseudocode prompts, but there is limited work focusing on the difference between digital pseudocode and compile-and-run assessment prompts. To investigate the impact of the assessment approach on student experience and performance, we conducted a study at a public university across two introductory programming classes (N=226). We found that students both preferred and performed better on typical programming assessment questions when they utilized a compile-and-run environment compared to a pseudocode environment. Our work suggests that compile-and-run assessments capture more nuanced evaluation of student ability by more closely reflecting the environments of programming practice and supports further work to explore administration of programming assessments.

  PublisherDOI

• Stop Reinventing the Wheel! Promoting Community Software in Computing Education

  2022 · 29 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web

  Historically, computing instructors and researchers have developed a wide variety of tools to support teaching and educational research, including exam and code testing suites and data collection solutions. However, these tools often find limited adoption beyond their creators. As a result, it is common for many of the same functionalities to be re-implemented by different instructional groups within the Computing Education community. We hypothesise that this is due in part to discoverability, availability, and adaptability challenges. Further, instructors often face institutional barriers to deployment, which can include hesitance of institutions to rely on community developed solutions that often lack a centralised authority and may be community or individually maintained.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Vincent Berry

  Université de Montpellier

  6 shared

• Lisa Anthony

  University of Florida

  5 shared

• John R. Hott

  University of Virginia

  5 shared

• Richard Glassey

  KTH Royal Institute of Technology

  4 shared

• Thiago Matheus de Andrade Bezerra

  University of Florida

  4 shared

• Dalton Cravens

  University of Florida

  4 shared

• Brian Plancher

  4 shared

• José Javier López

  University of Florida

  4 shared

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Engineering, CISE

  University of Florida

  2020

• Master of Science, Computer Engineering, CISE

  University of Florida

  2007

• Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, CISE

  University of Florida

  2002