The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge…

Controlling complexity through the use of abstractions is a critical part of problem solving in programming. Thus, becoming proficient with procedural and data abstraction through the use of user-defined functions is important. Properly using functions for abstraction involves a number of other core concepts, such as parameter passing, scope and…

When teaching Geographical Information Systems (GIS) it is important to explain the theoretical elements, but it is also necessary to illustrate the basic functions with examples. To help students it is advisable to separate the teaching of fundamentals from the practical application of complex GIS software. A simple programming language like Logo…

Video and computer games have become an important area of study in the field of education. Games have been designed to teach mathematics, physics, raise social awareness, teach history and geography, and train soldiers in the military. Recent work has created computer games for teaching computer programming and understanding basic algorithms. …

Many students experience difficulties learning to program. They find learning to program in the object-oriented paradigm particularly challenging. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting…

Based on a computer-science course, this article outlines an alternative ordering of programming concepts that aims to develop a reuse habit before other styles of programming are developed. Although the discussion is based on transition from Modula-2 to C++, the issues raised apply to transition from any procedural to any object-oriented…

A considerable amount of experiences in teaching object-oriented concepts using the Java language have been reported to date, some of which describe language pitfalls and concrete learning difficulties. In this paper, a number of additional issues that have been experienced as difficult for students to master, along with approaches intended to…