Anecdotal evidence shows that in computer programming courses plagiarism is a widespread problem. With the growing number of students in such courses, manual plagiarism detection is impractical. This requires instructors to use one of the many available plagiarism detection tools. Prior to choosing one of such tools, a metric that assures the…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Java is an object-oriented programming language. From a software engineering perspective, object-oriented design and programming is used at the architectural design, and structured design and programming is used at the detailed design within methods. As such, structured programming skills are fundamental to more advanced object-oriented…

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…

With universities having difficulty attracting students to study information technology (IT), the scores needed for entry into IT degrees have dropped markedly. IT schools are thus having to cope by adjusting their introductory courses to ensure that students will still learn what is expected but without negatively impacting on pass rates. This…

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new computing paradigm that has been adopted by major computer companies as well as government agencies such as the Department of Defense for mission-critical applications. SOC is being used for developing Web and electronic business applications, as well as robotics, gaming, and scientific applications. Yet,…

This paper examines how students' experiences of learning to program are affected by feelings of fear, using a phenomenological approach to elicit rich descriptions of personal experiences from the narratives of final year undergraduate students. In the course of reviewing current work concerning learning or teaching programming, certain focal…

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.…

Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of…

Business intelligence derived from data warehousing and data mining has become one of the most strategic management tools today, providing organizations with long-term competitive advantages. Business school curriculums and popular database textbooks cover data warehousing, but the examples and problem sets typically are small and unrealistic. The…

There exists a wealth of computing education literature devoted to interventions designed to overcome novices' difficulties in learning to write computer programs. However, various studies have shown that the majority of students at the end of a semester of instruction are still unable to write a simple computer program, despite the best efforts…

Several researchers have studied the impact of collaboration between the learners on their cognitive levels, but few studies have been carried out on the impact of collaboration between the teachers. The aim of our research is to study the effects on the knowledge levels of learners of collaborative construction of learning objects created by the…

Program visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical--often animated--and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of…

Open Source Software (OSS) is a major force in today's Information Technology (IT) landscape. Companies are increasingly using OSS in mission-critical applications. The transparency of the OSS technology itself with openly available source codes makes it ideal for students to participate in the OSS project development. OSS can provide unique…

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…