Lab-centric instruction emphasizes supervised, hands-on activities by substituting lab for lecture time. It combines a multitude of pedagogical techniques into the format of an extended, structured closed lab. We discuss the range of benefits for students, including increased staff interaction, frequent and varied self-assessments, integrated…

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java…

Conventional introduction to computer science presents individual algorithmic paradigms in the context of specific, prototypical problems. To complement this algorithm-centric instruction, this study additionally advocates problem-centric instruction. I present an original problem drawn from students' life that is simply stated but provides rich…

The current paper describes an empirical study with the aim of producing insights about how students experience programming and software engineering. The research aims to investigate the students' world, and hence, we have chosen a phenomenographic approach. Our questions focus on the students' experiences of concepts related to a realistic…

Programming education is a widely researched and intensely discussed topic. The literature proposes a broad variety of pedagogical viewpoints, practical approaches, learning theories, motivational vehicles, and other elements of the learning situation. However, little effort has been put on understanding cultural and contextual differences in…

This article describes how research methodologies were modified and integrated during the doctoral research conducted by the first author under the supervision of the second author. The research project concerned trying to understand why teachers do or don't use "Jeliot", a program animation system designed to facilitate teaching and learning of…

We present an innovative pedagogical approach that we call "constructive evaluation," which shifts students from being consumers of knowledge to participants in a community of peers engaged in actively producing and sharing knowledge. Students are required to author a question that assesses one or more of the learning outcomes of a course. In…

One of the subjects that undergraduate students learning Object Oriented (OO) design find hard to apply is the construction of class hierarchies in general, and the use of interface classes in particular. The design process requires decomposition and reconstruction of problems in order to model software classes. The common attributes and behaviors…

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…

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is changing the way we build, operate, and maintain our software-intensive systems. Several projects using MDE practices are reporting significant improvements in quality and performance but, to be able to handle these projects, software engineers need a set of technical and interpersonal skills that are currently…

This study broadens the objectives of previous work (Boyer, N., Langevin, S., Gaspar, A. (2008). "Self direction and constructivism in programming education." "Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group in IT Education Conference," 16-18 October 2008, Cincinnati, OH) in which we used a survey-based instrument, the Personal…

This article describes an approach whereby patterns are used to describe management issues and solutions to be used during the project management of team-based software development. The work describes how web 2.0 technologies have been employed to support the use and development of such patterns. To evaluate the success of patterns and the…

Student attrition and low graduation rates are critical problems in computer science education. Disappointing graduation rates and declining student interest have caught the attention of business leaders, researchers and universities. With weak graduation rates and little interest in scientific computing, many are concerned about the USA's ability…

This article describes a holistic approach to designing an introductory, object-oriented programming course. The design is grounded in constructivism and pedagogy of phenomenography. We use constructive alignment as the framework to align assessments, learning, and teaching with planned learning outcomes. We plan learning and teaching activities,…

This study investigates differences between collaboration methods in two summer enrichment classes for students entering the sixth grade. In one treatment, students used pair programming. In the other treatment, students engaged in frequent collaboration, but worked on their own computer. Students in the two treatments did not differ significantly…