It is important that software testing courses at universities provide students with testing skills that are close to the skills needed by industry. To investigate if these courses do accomplish this role, this research provides comparison and empirical analysis of the topics provided by 80 software testing courses in nine countries around the…

Background: In agile software engineering team projects, effective collaboration and communication between members are essential for promoting agility and lean software development. Agile methodologies, which emphasize iterative development, collaboration and adaptability, are well suited to dynamic educational environments. However, agile teams…

While there have been many calls for teaching ethics and responsible computing, it is unclear how responsible computing instruction and technical learning interact. Some instructors even hesitate to include ethics in their courses, fearing it might distract students from learning technical computing content. An approach called…

CODAP is a widely-used programming environment for secondary school data science. Its direct-manipulation-based design offers many advantages to learners, especially younger students. Unfortunately, these same advantages can become a liability when it comes to repeating operations consistently, replaying operations (for reproducibility), and also…

Computer programming skills have been growing as a professional competence also to unqualified end-users who need to develop software in their professional practice. Quality evaluation models of end-user-developed products are still scarce. In this paper, we propose a metric that leverages "When", a condition typically found in…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Unified Modelling Language (UML) class diagrams are standard tools in software engineering education, typically analysed for syntactical correctness rather than their communicative dimensions. This study applies semiotic theory to investigate how first-year Bachelor of Computer Information Systems students engage with UML class diagrams as…

Aim/Purpose: This paper is part of a multi-case study that aims to test whether generative AI makes an effective coding assistant. Particularly, this work evaluates the ability of two AI chatbots (ChatGPT and Bing Chat) to generate concise computer code, considers ethical issues related to generative AI, and offers suggestions for how to improve…

Data transfer between isolated clusters is imperative for cybersecurity education, research, and testing. Such techniques facilitate hands-on cybersecurity learning in isolated clusters, allow cybersecurity students to practice with various hacking tools, and develop professional cybersecurity technical skills. Educators often use these remote…

Automatic program repair (APR) tools are valuable for students to assist them with debugging tasks since program repair captures the code modification to make a buggy program pass the given test-suite. However, the process of manually generating catalogs of code modifications is intricate and time-consuming. This article proposes contextual error…

Background and Context: Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to address this problem. However, such tools do not identify plagiarism, nor suggest what assignment submissions are suspicious of plagiarism. Source code plagiarism…

Domain models in software engineering--often represented as class diagrams--depict relevant classes in a given problem domain along with necessary relationships among those classes. These models are important because they establish links between the requirements of a given system under development and the subsequent phases of the systems…

Background and Context: Efforts to engage adult learners in computer science in the United States have been largely unsuccessful. While research examining the use of music for teaching computer programming with K-12 learners is emerging, little research with adult learners exists. Objective: This study evaluates the effect of computer coding…

Teaching robotics with the robot operating system (ROS) is valuable for instating good programming practices but requires significant setup steps from the learner. Providing a ready-made ROS learning environment over the web can make robotics more accessible; however, most of the previous remote labs have abstracted the authentic ROS developer…

When the new programming language Pascal was developed in the 1970's, Walter Gander did not like it because because many features which he appreciated in prior programming languages were missing in Pascal. For example the block structure was gone, there were no dynamical arrays, no functions or procedures were allowed as parameters of a procedure,…