Reduction is a problem-solving strategy, relevant to various areas of computer science, and strongly connected to abstraction: a reductive solution necessitates establishing a connection among problems that may seem totally disconnected at first sight, and abstracts the solution to the reduced-to problem by encapsulating it as a black box. The…

The research presented in this article deals with the difficulties and mental processes involved in the definition, implementation, and use of abstract data types encountered by 12th grade advanced-level computer science students. Research findings are interpreted within the theoretical framework of "reducing abstraction" [Hazzan 1999]. The…

The design of computer science curricula should rely on central concepts of the discipline rather than on technical short-term developments. Several authors have proposed lists of basic concepts or fundamental ideas in the past. However, these catalogs were based on subjective decisions without any empirical support. This article describes the…

This issue is devoted to the curriculum guidelines from the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. These guidelines provide a coherent and important model for computing education within a liberal arts context, giving primacy to critical reason, rigorous methods, and student engagement in the research process. In this regard, they are at the…

Revising and extending conference articles for journal publication benefits both authors and readers. The new articles are more complete, and benefit from peer review, feedback from conference presentation, and greater editorial consistency. For those articles that are appropriate, we encourage authors to do this, and present two examples of such…

This special issue features a set of papers recently published in the 3rd International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER'07). The papers were selected because they closely meet the publication criteria for ACM/JERIC: stemming from computing education practice, grounded in relevant literature, containing analysis of primary empirical…

Computer science students need to learn how to write high-quality software. An important methodology for achieving quality is design-by-contract, in which code is developed together with its specification, which is given as class invariants and method pre- and postconditions. This paper describes practical experience in teaching design-by-contract…

Learning computing with respect to the context of its use has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students…

The educational literature recognizes that people go through a number of stages in their intellectual development. During the first stage, called "received knowledge" or "dualism", people expect knowledge to be handed to them by authority figures (thus "received") and think in terms of black and white (thus "dualism"). Our experience indicates…

In a study of the types of problems encountered by students that led them to seek assistance, Robins et al. [2006] found that the most common problems were related to trivial mechanics. The students in this study worked by themselves on their programming exercises. This article discusses a replication of the Robins et al. study in which the…

Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing…

Pair programming, as part of the Agile Development process, has noted benefits in professional software development scenarios. These successes have led to a rise in use of pair programming in educational settings, particularly in Computer Science 1 (CS1). Specifically, McDowell et al. [2006] has shown that students using pair programming in CS1 do…

We have been using robots in our artificial intelligence course since fall 2000. We have been using the robots for open-laboratory projects. The projects are designed to emphasize high-level knowledge-based AI algorithms. After three offerings of the course, we paused to analyze the collected data and to see if we could answer the following…

In the summer of 2003, a project to augment and improve the teaching of information assurance courses was started at IUP. Thus far, ten hands-on exercises have been developed. The exercises described in this article, and presented in the appendix, are based on actions required to secure a Linux host. Publicly available resources were used to…

In introductory computer science courses, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used to teach basic object-oriented design. However, there appears to be a lack of suitable software to support this task. Many of the available programs that support UML focus on developing code and not on enhancing learning. Programs designed for…