An increase in student motivation is often cited as an expected effect of software visualization, but, as far as the authors are aware, no controlled experiments have yet demonstrated this. This paper therefore presents a controlled evaluation of this effect, conducted within the framework of self-determination theory. Students were tasked with…

Course objectives, like research objectives and product requirements, help provide clarity and direction for faculty and students. Unfortunately, course and laboratory objectives are not always clearly stated. Without a clear set of objectives, it can be hard to design a learning experience and determine whether students are achieving the intended…

This paper presents the results of two educational experiments carried out to determine whether the process of specifying requirements (catalog-based reuse as opposed to conventional specification) has an impact on effectiveness and productivity in co-located and distributed software development environments. The participants in the experiments…

Carrying out real-world software projects in their academic studies helps students to understand what they will face in industry, and to experience first-hand the challenges involved when working collaboratively. Most of the instructional strategies used to help students take advantage of these activities focus on supporting agile programming,…

Concept inventory tests are one method to evaluate conceptual understanding and identify possible misconceptions. The multiple-choice question format, offering a choice between a correct selection and common misconceptions, can provide an assessment of students' conceptual understanding in various dimensions. Misconceptions of some engineering…

One of the more interesting approaches to teaching advanced logic concepts is the use of online laboratory frameworks to provide student access to remote field-programmable devices. There is as yet, however, no conclusive evidence of the effectiveness of such an approach. This paper presents the Advanced Digital Lab, a remote laboratory based on…

Despite a widely-acknowledged shortage of software developers, and reports of a gap between industry needs and software education, the possible gap between students' needs and software development education has not been explored in detail. In their university education, students want to take courses and carry out projects that clearly relate to…

Keeping up with novel methods and keeping abreast of new applications are crucial issues in engineering education. In brain research, one of the most significant research areas in recent decades, many developments have application in both modern engineering technology and education. New measurement methods in the observation of brain activity open…

This paper presents ReAct!, an interactive educational tool for artificial intelligence (AI) planning for robotics. ReAct! enables students to describe robots' actions and change in dynamic domains without first having to know about the syntactic and semantic details of the underlying formalism, and to solve planning problems using…

Software development relies heavily on teamwork; determining how to streamline this collaborative development is an essential training subject in computer and software engineering education. A team process known as the meetings-flow (MF) approach has recently been introduced in software capstone projects in engineering programs at various…

Software process modeling (SPM) is an important area of software engineering because it provides a basis for managing, automating, and supporting software process improvement (SPI). Teaching SPM is a challenging task, mainly because it lays great emphasis on theory and offers few practical exercises. Furthermore, as yet few teaching approaches…

Teaching larger software engineering project courses at the end of a computing curriculum is a way for students to learn some aspects of real-world jobs in industry. Such courses, often referred to as capstone courses, are effective for learning how to apply the skills they have acquired in, for example, design, test, and configuration management.…

This paper investigates the impact of combining self explaining (SE) with computer architecture diagrams to help novice students learn assembly language programming. Pre- and post-test scores for the experimental and control groups were compared and subjected to covariance (ANCOVA) statistical analysis. Results indicate that the SE-plus-diagram…

Technological literacy education involves the teaching of basic engineering principles and problem solving, including elementary electrical circuit analysis, to non-engineering students. Learning materials on circuit analysis typically rely on equations and schematic diagrams, which are often unfamiliar to non-engineering students. The goal of…