Designing and explaining programs are often difficult tasks, especially when novices are involved. It also concerns more experienced programmers when complex algorithms need to be carefully explained and documented as part of software development.Good practice suggests that code and documentation be tightly coupled; but there are only a few…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Most electrical engineering and computer science undergraduate programs include at least one course on microcontrollers and assembly language programming. Some departments offer legacy courses in C programming, but few include C programming from an embedded systems perspective, where it is still regularly used. Distributed computing and parallel…

This article provides an analysis of student responses to an exercise used in a computer ethics and a software engineering course to raise awareness of issues related to hiring, including issues of professional responsibility and diversity. Students from two different universities were asked to evaluate four candidates for two positions in a…

With the development of XML Web Services, the Internet could become an integral part of and the basis for teaching computer science and software engineering. The approach has been applied to a university course for students studying introduction to computer science from the point of view of software development in a stateless, Internet…

Computer programming lends itself to automated assessment. With appropriate software tools, program correctness can be measured, along with an indication of quality according to a set of metrics. Furthermore, the regularity of program code allows plagiarism detection to be an integral part of the tools that support assessment. In this paper, we…

Becoming a quality software developer requires practice under the guidance of an expert mentor. Unfortunately, in most academic environments, there are not enough experts to provide any significant design mentoring for software engineering students. To address this problem, we present a collaborative software design tool intended to maximize an…

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…

This article reports on the design, implementation, and usage of the CourseMarker (formerly known as CourseMaster) courseware Computer Based Assessment (CBA) system at the University of Nottingham. Students use CourseMarker to solve (programming) exercises and to submit their solutions. CourseMarker returns immediate results and feedback to the…

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…

Those science, mathematics, and engineering faculty who are serious about making the education they offer as available to their daughters as to their sons are, we posit, facing the prospect of dismantling a large part of its traditional pedagogical structure, along with the assumptions and practice which support it. [Seymour and Hewett 1997].Prior…