It is important that software testing courses at universities provide students with testing skills that are close to the skills needed by industry. To investigate if these courses do accomplish this role, this research provides comparison and empirical analysis of the topics provided by 80 software testing courses in nine countries around the…

Computer programming skills have been growing as a professional competence also to unqualified end-users who need to develop software in their professional practice. Quality evaluation models of end-user-developed products are still scarce. In this paper, we propose a metric that leverages "When", a condition typically found in…

Background and Context: Students learning the C programming language struggle to debug, and to understand the runtime behaviour of, their programs. Objective: We examine a tool that combines several novice-focused error detection, program visualization, and debugging techniques, to investigate which features students use in real study sessions,…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…

To have software tools that facilitate the rapid development of applications and generate information systems is a requirement in a globalized world. Worldwide in the engineers training field it is basic to apply measurements and evaluations to the rapid design tools used to obtain applications faster and generate quality information systems in…

Nowadays, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) have been used as complementary methods to support classroom teaching. SPOCs are courses that apply the usage of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), combining classroom with online education, making them an exciting alternative for contexts such as emergency remote teaching. Although SPOCs have been…

Courses on computer programming are included in the curricula of almost all engineering disciplines. We surveyed the research literature and identified the techniques that are commonly used by instructors for teaching these courses. We observed that visual programming and game-based learning can enhance computational thinking and problem-solving…

Two critical problems facing the software (S/W) industry today are the lack of appreciation of the full benefits that can be derived from Software Verification and Validation (V&V) and an associated problem of shortage of adequately trained V&V practitioners. To address this situation, the software V&V course curriculum at the author's…

Several years ago we presented an experimental, discovery-learning approach to the active learning of greedy algorithms. This paper presents GreedEx, a visualization tool developed to support this didactic method. The paper states the design goals of GreedEx, makes explicit the major design decisions adopted, and describes its main characteristics…

This paper explores a new approach to engage students in authoring educational content. This approach was implemented in AnnotEx (Example Annotator) system, which allows students to annotate computer programming examples with line-by-line explanations and review annotations produced by their peers. A controlled study of AnnotEx presented in this…

This study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse…

Learning objects (LOs) are digital or non-digital entities used for learning, education or training commonly stored in repositories searchable by their associated metadata. Unfortunately, based on the current standards, such metadata is often missing or incorrectly entered making search difficult or impossible. In this paper, we investigate…

Purpose: To overcome the high manual effort of assessments for teaching personnel, e-assessment systems are used to assess students using information systems (IS). The purpose of this paper is to propose an extension of EASy, a system for e-assessment of exercises that require higher-order cognitive skills. The latest module allows assessing…

We present a novel approach to the automated marking of student programming assignments. Our technique quantifies the structural similarity between unmarked student submissions and marked solutions, and is the basis by which we assign marks. This is accomplished through an efficient novel graph similarity measure ("AssignSim"). Our experiments…

Students in all areas of computing require knowledge of the computing device including software implementation at the machine level. Several courses in computer science curricula address these low-level details such as computer architecture and assembly languages. For such courses, there are advantages to studying real architectures instead of…