There is a need for outreach programs to attract a diverse range of students to the computing discipline. The lack of qualified computing graduates to fill the growing number of computing vacancies is of concern to government and industry and there are few female students entering the computing pipeline at high school level. This paper presents…

Purpose: This paper narrates a case study on design thinking-based education work in an industrial design honours program. Student projects were developed in a multi-disciplinary setting across a Computing and Engineering faculty that allowed promoting technologically and user-driven innovation strategies. Design/methodology/approach: A renewed…

Within existing ICT degrees there is a widely-held belief that content must be tailored for different "kinds" of students--often two differing student groups: a technical group requiring detailed Computer Science knowledge and a separate group requiring less technical, more strategic ICT knowledge and skills. Our institution has produced…

An important aspect of education is to promote higher-order thinking skills to learners. However, in the lecture environment, learners are passively engaged and it is unlikely for higher-order thinking to occur. Although interventions such as "clickers" can be used to increase engagement in lectures, this does not necessarily promote…

Contributing student pedagogy (CSP) builds upon social constructivist and community-based learning principles to create engaging and productive learning experiences. What makes CSP different from other, related, learning approaches is that it involves students both learning from and also explicitly valuing the contributions of other students. The…

Higher education programs need to prepare their graduates for the practical challenges they can expect to face upon entering the workforce. Students can be better prepared if their academic learning is reinforced through authentic workplace experience, where the link between theory and professional practice can be realized. Increasingly, such…

This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the perceptions of information and communication technology (ICT) as a field of study and work in German secondary schools. A total of 160 students from five secondary schools in Lower Saxony participated in the study in February 2007, and four teachers of the students were interviewed. The…

This paper reports preliminary work in an ARC Linkage Project involving collaboration among James Cook University, Education Queensland, and Technology One (a Queensland based company). The project aims to identify and interpret factors associated with low female participation rates in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) professional…

The Science and Mathematics Education Centre (SMEC) at the Western Australian Institute of Technology offers two graduate courses: Graduate Diploma in Science Education and the Master of Applied Science (Science Education). Three distinct groups of students engaged in these SMEC programs can be identified based on their interests/expertise in…

The advantages of centralized and decentralized computing facilities within institutions of higher learning are discussed; arguments for the decentralized but not random distribution of computing facilities for schools of teacher education are presented; and the organizational structure of one "centralized but decentralized" computing…

Lack of accessibility in the design of e-learning courses continues to hinder students with vision impairment. E-learning materials are predominantly vision-centric, incorporating images, animation, and interactive media, and as a result students with acute vision impairment do not have equal opportunity to gain tertiary qualifications or skills…