We studied students' conceptions of correctness and their influence on students' correctness-related practices by examining how 159 students had analyzed the correctness of error-free and erroneous algorithms and by interviewing seven students regarding their work. We found that students conceptualized program correctness as the sum of the…

We observe that recruitment efforts aimed at alleviating the shortage of skilled workforce in computer engineering must be augmented with strategies for retaining and motivating the students after they have enrolled in our educational programmes. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, we have taken a first step in this direction by…

Design patterns have become a widely acknowledged software engineering practice and therefore have been incorporated in the curricula of most computer science departments. This paper presents an observational study on students' ability to understand and apply design patterns. Within the context of a postgraduate software engineering course,…

In this paper the authors analyse the design and implementation of a course about learning management systems (LMS). The course was first given in Cuba and then in Guatemala and Peru, within the project USo+I: "Universidad, Sociedad e Innovacion, Mejora de la pertinencia de la educacion en las ingenierias de Latinoamerica" financed by…

The authors assign semester- or quarter-long team-based projects in several Computer Science and Finance courses. This paper reports on our experience in designing, managing, and evaluating such projects. In particular, we discuss the effects of team size and of various peer evaluation schemes on team performance and student learning. We report…

Creativity is an important entity in developing human capital while computer games are the current generation's contemporary tool. This study focused on the teaching of computer games development in order to enhance the creative perception of secondary school children. The study applied randomised subjects, with control group experimental design,…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…

A collaboration between three higher education institutions in Ireland and two European partners has resulted in the design and development of reusable learning objects for undergraduate programming students that would assist in their learning. This international project conducted extensive research of over 600 students' examination scripts in…

In this paper, two emerging learning and teaching methods have been studied: collaboration in concert with algorithm visualization. When visualizations have been employed in collaborative learning, collaboration introduces new challenges for the visualization tools. In addition, new theories are needed to guide the development and research of the…

Contains annotations for resources on the history of computing. Includes resources for technical computing history, general computing history, precomputer era, the impact of computing and series. (CW)

Points out that mainframe computer users today can make their requirements known to the computer in simple English. Provides a listing of fourth generation computer language advantages over third generation languages. Summarizes a program to streamline faculty records on a mainframe computer. (MVL)

Web 2.0 and virtual world technologies are here to stay. Today, our students come to our classroom with a presence on Facebook, the latest concert as a podcast on their MP3 player, and experience playing games in virtual worlds. In some respects, students are more tech-savvy than their Information Systems professors. Research showing the benefits…

This study is a third in a series of studies that examined students' information seeking and problem solving behaviors while interacting with one of two types of web-based representations of an ill-structured instructional design case: hierarchical (tree-like) and heterarchical (network-like). A Java program was used to track students' hypermedia…

This paper describes the design and implementation of a tool for experimenting with mobile robotics concepts, primarily for use by children and teenagers, or by the general public, without previous experience in robotics. This tool helps children learn about science in an approachable and interactive way, using scientific research principles in…

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…