Background and Context: Recognizing that digital technologies can enable economic transformation in Africa, computing education has been considered a subject relevant for all within the compulsory level of education. The implementation of the subject in many schools is, however, characterized by a myriad of challenges, including pedagogical…

The improvement of computing courses is a permanent need and is a goal established by any teacher. Suggestions of possible course improvements should be made by teachers and students. Computer project-based courses involving a significant number of people pose difficulties to listening to all their opinions. The purpose of our research is twofold:…

Programming is recognised as one of seven grand challenges in computing education and attracts much attention in computing education research. Most research in the area concerns teaching methods, educational technology and student understanding/misconceptions. Typically, evaluation of learning outcome takes place during or immediately following…

Visual program simulation (VPS) is a new, interactive form of educational program visualisation, in which learners use graphical controls to direct a program's execution rather than simply watching an animation of it. In this article, we report on a qualitative empirical study of novice programmers learning through VPS. From an analysis of…

The number of students choosing to study computing at university continues to decline this century, with an even sharper decline in female students. This article presents the results of a series of interviews with university students studying computing courses in Australia that uncovered the influence of happenstance and compromise on course…

Project MLeXAI [Machine Learning eXperiences in Artificial Intelligence (AI)] seeks to build a set of reusable course curriculum and hands on laboratory projects for the artificial intelligence classroom. In this article, we describe two game-based projects from the second phase of project MLeXAI: Robot Defense--a simple real-time strategy game…

Students learn better when they both hear and do. In computer architecture courses "doing" can be difficult in small schools without hardware laboratories hosted by computer engineering, electrical engineering, or similar departments. Software solutions exist. Our success with George Mills' Multimedia Logic (MML) is the focus of this paper. MML…

This paper analyses the teaching and learning of computing in a Web-conferencing environment. A discourse analysis of three introductory programming learning episodes is presented to demonstrate issues and effects that arise when teaching computing using such an approach. The subject of discussion, the interactive nature of discussion and any…

A new classification system for computing education papers is presented and applied to every computing education paper published between January 2004 and January 2007 at the two premier computing education conferences in Australia and New Zealand. We find that while simple reports outnumber other types of paper, a healthy proportion of papers…

Less than one half of one percent of all processors manufactured today end up in computers. The rest are embedded in other devices such as automobiles, airplanes, trains, satellites, and nearly every modern electronic device. Developing software for embedded systems requires a greater knowledge of hardware than developing for a typical desktop…

A survey of over 700 Ontario secondary schools was conducted in 1987 and again in 1989 to determine the current status of computer programing pedagogy. Presents an overview of the computer education curriculum for grades 10-12 and results related to hardware utilization, choice of programing languages, availability of teacher and student…