Designing and explaining programs are often difficult tasks, especially when novices are involved. It also concerns more experienced programmers when complex algorithms need to be carefully explained and documented as part of software development.Good practice suggests that code and documentation be tightly coupled; but there are only a few…

The educational literature recognizes that people go through a number of stages in their intellectual development. During the first stage, called "received knowledge" or "dualism", people expect knowledge to be handed to them by authority figures (thus "received") and think in terms of black and white (thus "dualism"). Our experience indicates…

In the summer of 2003, a project to augment and improve the teaching of information assurance courses was started at IUP. Thus far, ten hands-on exercises have been developed. The exercises described in this article, and presented in the appendix, are based on actions required to secure a Linux host. Publicly available resources were used to…

Most electrical engineering and computer science undergraduate programs include at least one course on microcontrollers and assembly language programming. Some departments offer legacy courses in C programming, but few include C programming from an embedded systems perspective, where it is still regularly used. Distributed computing and parallel…

With the development of XML Web Services, the Internet could become an integral part of and the basis for teaching computer science and software engineering. The approach has been applied to a university course for students studying introduction to computer science from the point of view of software development in a stateless, Internet…

Computer programming lends itself to automated assessment. With appropriate software tools, program correctness can be measured, along with an indication of quality according to a set of metrics. Furthermore, the regularity of program code allows plagiarism detection to be an integral part of the tools that support assessment. In this paper, we…

Computer science students need to learn how to write high-quality software. An important methodology for achieving quality is design-by-contract, in which code is developed together with its specification, which is given as class invariants and method pre- and postconditions. This paper describes practical experience in teaching design-by-contract…

In this article we describe a programming framework called Pyro, which provides a set of abstractions that allows students to write platform-independent robot programs. This project is unique because of its focus on the pedagogical implications of teaching mobile robotics via a top-down approach. We describe the background of the project, its…

In this paper, we present our experiences in using two automatic assessment tools, TRAKLA and TRAKLA2, in a second course of programming. In this course, 500-700 students have been enrolled annually during the period 1993-2004. The tools are specifically designed for assessing algorithm simulation exercises in which students simulate the working…

Although computer scientists understand the importance of discrete mathematics to the foundations of their field, computer science (CS) students do not always see the relevance. Thus, it is important to find a way to show students its relevance. The concept of program correctness is generally taught as an activity independent of the programming…

This article reports on the design, implementation, and usage of the CourseMarker (formerly known as CourseMaster) courseware Computer Based Assessment (CBA) system at the University of Nottingham. Students use CourseMarker to solve (programming) exercises and to submit their solutions. CourseMarker returns immediate results and feedback to the…

In introductory computer science courses, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used to teach basic object-oriented design. However, there appears to be a lack of suitable software to support this task. Many of the available programs that support UML focus on developing code and not on enhancing learning. Programs designed for…

Pair-programming has been found to be very beneficial in educational settings. Students who pair in their introductory programming course are more confident, have greater course completion and pass rates, and are more likely to persist in computer-related majors. Although pairing helps all students, we believe that it is particularly beneficial…