The global shortage of skilled programmers remains a persistent challenge. High dropout rates in introductory programming courses pose a significant obstacle to graduation. Previous studies highlighted learning difficulties in programming students, but their specific weaknesses remained unclear. This gap exists due to the predominant focus on the…

The use of digital media among student community has increased their level of distraction during classroom teaching. Capturing their attention in classrooms, has become a cumbersome task for teaching faculty. Therefore, most of the academic institutions have resorted to the use of activity-based learning for science and engineering students that…

A central issue in the design of curricula for all school levels is the development of the learners' high-order thinking skills and metacognitive skills. Among such required skills is the ability to solve problems. The literature dealing with the development of problem-solving skills is vast and primarily addresses the scientific disciplines, even…

Stepwise program refinement techniques can be used to simplify program verification. Programs are better understood since their main properties are clearly stated, and verification of rather complex algorithms is reduced to proving simple statements connecting successive program specifications. Additionally, it is easy to analyse similar…

"Thriving in Our Digital World" is a technology-enhanced dual enrollment course introducing high school students to computer science through project- and problem-based learning. This article describes the evolution of the course and five lessons learned during the design, development, implementation, and iteration of the course from its…

Many interventions have been proposed to improve the retention and graduation rates of engineering students. One such intervention is to use study groups for first-year college students; such groups provide a structured environment in which the students can learn course material from each other outside of class and can provide the students with a…

Practical abilities are important for students from majors including Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Along with the popularity of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC) and other programming contests, online judge (OJ) websites achieve rapid development, thus providing a new kind of programming…

Introduction: Studies have indicated that users' text highlighting behaviour can be further manipulated to improve the relevance of retrieved results. This article reports on a study that examined users' text highlight frequency, length and users' copy-paste actions. Method: A binary voting mechanism was employed to determine the weights for the…

The Finnish national school curriculum, effective from 2004, does not include any topics related to Computer Science (CS). To alleviate the problem that school students are not able to study CS-related topics, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki prepared a completely online course that is open to pupils and students in…

Dunlap, The University of Alabama, USA ABSTRACT In the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) curriculum at The University of Alabama, freshmen are introduced to fundamental electrical concepts and units, DC circuit analysis techniques, operational amplifiers, circuit simulation, design, and professional ethics. The two credit course has both…

In the way of continuous improvement in teaching methods this paper explores the effects of Cooperative Learning (CL) against Traditional Learning (TL) in academic performance of students in higher education in two groups of the first course of Computer Science Degree at the university. The empirical study was conducted through an analysis of…

What features lead a student to choose sport science, chemistry, physics, computer science or musicology as their subject of study and the Saarland University Saarbrücken as their place of study? Empirical analysis shows that study conditions for students of chemistry, physics and music do not play an important role in selecting the place of…

Computer Science (CS) courses comprise both Programming and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) issues; however these two areas have substantial differences, inter alia the attitudes and beliefs of the students regarding the intended learning content. In this research, factors from the Social Cognitive Theory and Unified Theory of…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

"Personal learning environments" (PLEs) and "personal learning networks" (PLNs) are well-known concepts. A personal learning network "cluster" is a small group of people who regularly interact academically and whose PLNs have a non-empty intersection that includes all the other members. At university level PLN…