Parson's programming puzzles are a family of code construction assignments where lines of code are given, and the task is to form the solution by sorting and possibly selecting the correct code lines. We introduce a novel family of Parson's puzzles where the lines of code need to be sorted in two dimensions. The vertical dimension is used to order…

Attempts to bridge the Digital Divide have seen vast investment in Information Communication Technology in schools. In the United Kingdom, the Computers for Pupils initiative has invested 60 million British Pounds of funds to help some of the most disadvantaged secondary school pupils by putting a computer in their home. This paper charts and…

Designing web technology courses that match students' knowledge background and emphasize students' hands-on experience is imperative yet challenging. This paper discusses a new approach to teaching web technologies, particularly, open source Web 2.0 technologies, in which a combination of studios, mini-lectures, presentations and tutorials, class…

Concurrent engineering or overlapping activities is a business strategy for schedule compression on large development projects. Design parameters and tasks from every aspect of a product's development process and their interdependencies are overlapped and worked on in parallel. Concurrent engineering suffers from negative effects such as excessive…

Learning about computers continues to be regarded as a rather informal and complex landscape dominated by individual exploratory and opportunistic approaches, even for students and instructors in Computer Science Departments. During the last two decades, software animated demonstrations (SADs), also known as screencasts, have attracted particular…

The majority of an engineer's time in the software industry is spent working with other programmers. Agile methods of software development like eXtreme Programming strongly rely upon practices like daily meetings and pair programming. Hence, the need to learn the skill of working collaboratively is of primary importance for software developers.…

Data mining is an emerging field of study in Information Systems programs. Although the course content has been streamlined, the underlying technology is still in a state of flux. The purpose of this paper is to describe how we utilized Microsoft Excel's data mining add-ins as a front-end to Microsoft's Cloud Computing and SQL Server 2008 Business…

Tumaini University at Iringa, Tanzania, started a new B.Sc. program in IT in 2007. In the course of planning and implementation of the program, we found out that standard ACM/IEEE IT curricula are not adequate for an IT program in a poor, developing country. The standard curricula describe, in detail, the competences that IT specialists in…

For the past years, the academic IT profession through various professional society curriculum committees and accreditation bodies has made considerable progress to revise and update IT curricula to meet the changing needs of the profession. In particular, learning techniques, beyond classroom teaching activities, have been recognized as essential…

Past research suggests that single-sex educational environments provide many benefits to women's learning. Similarly, as indicated by their under-representation, it is known that there are problems in attracting and subsequently retaining women in information technology disciplines. In an effort to improve the enrollment and retention of women, we…

Improving learning effectiveness has always been a constant challenge in software education and training. One of the primary tasks educators face is to motivate learners to perform to their best abilities. Using computer games is one means to encourage learners to learn (Klawe, 1994). When games are used in general education, they could enhance…

This paper reports on the findings from a quantitative research study into the use of a software tool that was built to support a part-complete solution method (PCSM) for the learning of computer programming. The use of part-complete solutions to programming problems is one of the methods that can be used to reduce the cognitive load that students…

It is common to find final or near final year undergraduate Information Technology students undertaking a substantial development project; a project where the students have the opportunity to be fully involved in the analysis, design, and development of an information technology service or product. This involvement has been catalyzed and prepared…

This paper identifies several areas of database modeling and design that have been problematic for students and even are likely to confuse faculty. Major contributing factors are the lack of clarity and inaccuracies that persist in the presentation of some basic database concepts in textbooks. The paper analyzes the problems and discusses ways to…

Modern information technology and computer science curricula employ a variety of graphical tools and development environments to facilitate student learning of introductory programming concepts and techniques. While the provision of interactive features and the use of visualization can enhance students' understanding and assist them in grasping…