While there have been many calls for teaching ethics and responsible computing, it is unclear how responsible computing instruction and technical learning interact. Some instructors even hesitate to include ethics in their courses, fearing it might distract students from learning technical computing content. An approach called…

Domain models in software engineering--often represented as class diagrams--depict relevant classes in a given problem domain along with necessary relationships among those classes. These models are important because they establish links between the requirements of a given system under development and the subsequent phases of the systems…

Objectives: Code style is an important aspect of text-based programming because programs written with good style are considered easier to understand and change and so improve the maintainability of the delivered software product. However teaching code style is complicated by the existence of many style guides and standards that contain…

Design is a distinct discipline with its own practices, tools, professions, and areas of scholarship. However, practitioners from other fields often leverage aspects of design in their own work, leading to subfields like engineering design and architecture design that are neither wholly design nor wholly the intersecting discipline. Similarly,…

Many practitioners might struggle with becoming productive in different software engineering (SE) roles due to misalignment of the skills learnt during the university time with what is expected in the industry. Companies spend significant resources to train the personnel, whose academic backgrounds are not only based on "computing…

Assessing team software development projects is notoriously difficult and typically based on subjective metrics. To help make assessments more rigorous, we conducted an empirical study to explore relationships between subjective metrics based on peer and instructor assessments, and objective metrics based on GitHub and chat data. We studied 23…

Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries are responsible for overshooting several planetary boundaries, with poorer communities contributing the least to the problems…

Nearly all software built today impinges upon end-user privacy and needs to comply with relevant regulations. Therefore, there have been increasing calls for integrating considerations of compliance with privacy regulations throughout the software engineering lifecycle. However, software engineers are typically trained in the technical fields and…

During the past two decades, "event-driven programming" (EDP) has emerged as a central and almost ubiquitous concept in modern software development: Graphical user interfaces are self-evident in most mobile and web-based applications, as well as in many embedded systems, and they are most often based on reacting to events. To facilitate…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

Cheating has been a long-standing issue in university assessments. However, the release of ChatGPT and other free-to-use generative AI tools has provided a new and distinct method for cheating. Students can run many assessment questions through the tool and generate a superficially compelling answer, which may or may not be accurate. We ran a…

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

This study focuses on the challenges encountered in online cybersecurity education. It adopts an exploratory research design using a mixed-methods approach to investigate the perceptions and experiences of postgraduate students enrolled in an online cybersecurity program. The collection of data is structured into two distinct phases. In the…

The types of programming errors that novice programmers make and struggle to resolve have long been of interest to researchers. Various past studies have analyzed the frequency of compiler diagnostic messages. This information, however, does not have a direct correlation to the types of errors students make, due to the inaccuracy and imprecision…

Service learning, a high-impact pedagogy, involves integrating academic outcomes with service to the community. The success of service learning experiences depends on the development of mutually reciprocal relationships between students, instructors, and community partners, ensuring equitable benefits for all stakeholders. To explore how…