Almost all collegiate programs in Computer Science offer an introductory course in programming primarily devoted to communicating the foundational principles of software design and development. The ACM designates this introduction to computer programming course for first-year students as CS1, during which methodologies for solving problems within…

Customer needs for high-quality goods and the risk of product-liability litigation against businesses have made companies look for a way to sustain quality assurance in their products and services. Lean manufacturing is the latest and most successful system being used by companies to turn their business around. Visual inspection plays an important…

Massively Multiuser On-line Learning (MMOL) Platforms, often called "virtual learning worlds", constitute a still unexplored context for communication-enhanced learning, where synchronous communication skills in an explicit social setting enhance the potential of effective collaboration. In this paper, we report on an experimental study of…

This paper describes how a new "Moodle" module, called "CTPracticals", is applied to the teaching of the practical content of a basic computer organization course. In the core of the module, an automatic verification engine enables it to process the VHDL designs automatically as they are submitted. Moreover, a straightforward…

Serious virtual worlds (SVWs) represent a great opportunity for learning and should embed a lot of high-quality contextualised information so that the player can take the most from his or her exploration of the environment. This requires defining new methodologies and tools for effective production. We have investigated this issue in implementing…

The course "Management of Fluid and Electrolyte Disorders" is an applied physiology course taught using lectures and paper-based cases. The course approaches fluid therapy from both basic science and clinical perspectives. While paper cases provide a basis for application of basic science concepts, they lack key components of genuine clinical…

This study was designed to explore the effectiveness in student performance and confidence of limited and full device simulators. The 30 employees from an information technology company who participated in this study were assigned to one of three groups. Each group received practice for learning a complex software procedure using traditional…

Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is useful for the purposes of relational thinking (i.e., as structures that can be dynamically bound to arguments). The authors present a theory of how a psychologically…

This paper describes a computational exercise at undergraduate level that demonstrates the employment of Monte Carlo simulation to study the conformational statistics of flexible polymer chains, and to predict solution properties. Three simple chain models, including excluded volume interactions, have been implemented in a public-domain computer…

Computers can help the range of ways learners build up their own perception. Students who collect data from the Internet can be self-directed and independent. They can select sources to study and the connections to follow. Relying on the bounds laid down by teachers, the students may be in full control of their subjects and their studies. Students…

The goal of this study is to develop a virtual farm for educational applications. Users can play the role of a farmer by planting vegetables and raising poultry on the virtual farm to observe their growth through online learning activities. The virtual farm possesses educational and entertaining functions, and it is designed by simulating the real…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

From 2004-2007, the University of Memphis carried out the NSF-funded Tri-P-LETS (Three P Learning Environment for Teachers and Students) project to improve local high-school computer science curricula. The project reached a total of 58 classrooms in eleven high schools emphasizing problem solving skills, programming concepts as opposed to syntax,…

The comprehension of interdependent complex systems, which is part of state and national standards, is an enormous challenge for learners. In traditional physiology teaching materials, which structure the human body into decoupled subsystems (e.g., respiratory and cardiovascular) isolated in separate chapters, there is a ubiquitous absence of…

In this article, a prototype Greek text to Greek Sign Language (GSL) conversion system is presented. The system is integrated into an educational platform that addresses the needs of teaching GSL grammar and was developed within the SYNENNOESE project (Efthimiou "et al." 2004a. Developing an e-learning platform for the Greek sign…