University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

This paper describes the use and benefits of Microsoft's Adventure Works (AW) database to teach advanced database skills in a hands-on, realistic environment. Database management and querying skills are a key element of a robust information systems curriculum, and active learning is an important way to develop these skills. To facilitate active…

This article deals with some aspects of studying Informatics in Russian schools. Those aspects are part of the "third dimension" of the Darmstadt model (they are also projected on the other two dimensions of this model) and include evolution of the subject, regulatory norms conforming to the Federal Educational Standards, the learning…

PatternCoder is a software tool to aid student understanding of class associations. It has a wizard-based interface which allows students to select an appropriate binary class association or design pattern for a given problem. Java code is then generated which allows students to explore the way in which the class associations are implemented in a…

This study compares the discussion participation and performance of 7 undergraduate students enrolled in an e-commerce programming course during the spring semester of 2010 to that of 13 students enrolled in the same course during fall of that year. In the former course, the instructor participated in the required discussion only at the very end…

This paper updates the efforts to educate blind students in higher education in the digital age and describes how to support the development of mental models in learning through tactile learning and 3D-printing technology. It cites research documenting a drop in Braille literacy along with the growth in use of digital technologies by blind…

This paper outlines an innovative game-based approach to learning introductory programming that is grounded in the development of computational thinking at an abstract conceptual level, but also provides a direct contextual relationship between game-play and learning traditional introductory programming. The paper proposes a possible model for,…

Computer Science (CS) is a relatively new disciple and how best to introduce it to new students remains an open question. Likewise, the identification of appropriate instructional strategies for the diverse topics that constitute the average curriculum remains open to debate. One approach considered by a number of practitioners in CS education…

This article provides insight into how computing majors experience the process of doing programming assignments in their first programming course. This grounded theory study sheds light on the various processes and contexts through which students constantly assess their self-efficacy as a programmer. The data consists of a series of four…

Bioinformatics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field that integrates computer science, mathematics, biology, and information technology to manage, analyze, and understand biological, biochemical and biophysical information. We present our experience in teaching an interdisciplinary course, Introduction to Bioinformatics, which was developed…

Software has an important role in supporting scientific work. This dissertation studies teams that build scientific software, focusing on the way that they determine what the software should do. These requirements engineering processes are investigated through three case studies of climate science software projects. The Earth System Modeling…

No individual subject area in IS 2002 impacts more aspects of computing theory or professional preparation than data modeling. For more than four decades the bedrock of data modeling has been the relational data model. There are numerous extensions, variations and implementations of this theory but its core remains the central anchor in the…

Operating system is the core course of the specialty of computer science and technology. To understand and master the operating system will directly affect students' further study on other courses. The course of operating system focuses more on theories. Its contents are more abstract and the knowledge system is more complicated. Therefore,…

Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be effective. Pattern matching, particularly at the…

Based on the assumption that wellbeing, positive emotions and engagement influence motivation for learning, the aim of this paper is to provide insight into students' emotional responses to and engagement in different learning designs. By comparing students' reports on the experiential qualities of three different learning designs, their…