Teaching Distributed Software Development with real distributed settings is a challenging and rewarding task. Distributed courses are idiosyncratically more challenging than standard local courses. We have experienced this during our distributed course, which has been run for 14 consecutive years. In this article, we present and analyze the…

Teaching is the process of conveying knowledge and skills to learners. It involves preventing misunderstandings or correcting misconceptions that learners have acquired. Thus, effective teaching relies on solid knowledge of the discipline, but also a good grasp of where learners are likely to trip up or misunderstand. In programming, there is much…

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places…

Despite the critical societal importance of computer security, security is not well integrated into the undergraduate computing curriculum. Security classes and tracks treat security issues as separable topics as opposed to fundamental issues that pervade all aspects of software development. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on security…

This article is a survey of program visualization systems intended for teaching beginners about the runtime behavior of computer programs. Our focus is on generic systems that are capable of illustrating many kinds of programs and behaviors. We inclusively describe such systems from the last three decades and review findings from their empirical…

Greenfoot is an educational integrated development environment aimed at learning and teaching programming. It is aimed at a target audience of students from about 14 years old upwards, and is also suitable for college- and university-level education. Greenfoot combines graphical, interactive output with programming in Java, a standard, text-based…

Computer Science (CS) is a relatively new disciple and how best to introduce it to new students remains an open question. Likewise, the identification of appropriate instructional strategies for the diverse topics that constitute the average curriculum remains open to debate. One approach considered by a number of practitioners in CS education…

This article reviews successful educational experiences in using program and algorithm visualizations (PAVs). First, we survey a total of 18 PAV systems that were subject to 33 evaluations. We found that half of the systems have only been tested for usability, and those were shallow inspections. The rest were evaluated with respect to their…

Example programs play an important role in the teaching and learning of programming. Students as well as teachers rank examples as the most important resources for learning to program. Example programs work as role models and must therefore always be consistent with the principles and rules we are teaching. However, it is difficult to find or…

Rich, interactive eLearning tools receive a lot of attention nowadays from both practitioners and researchers. However, broader dissemination of these tools is hindered by the technical difficulties of their integration into existing platforms. This article explores the technical and conceptual problems of using several interactive educational…

This article provides an overview of the challenges in implementing a game development course with limited resources in computing curricula. An approach to a holistic game development course is outlined in terms of its organization, software, and instructional methods. The course had 23 students enrolled in its first offering and was…