Student-directed projects--projects in which students have individual control over what they create and how to create it--are a promising practice for supporting the development of conceptual understanding and personal interest in K-12 computer science classrooms. In this article, we explore a central (and perhaps counterintuitive) design…

Hackathons, the time-bound collaborative project-based computer science competitions increasingly popular with computer science students, are one of the largest-scale innovations in computing education of the past decade. This research examined three hackathons and 46,500 surveys to find that educational benefits were unequal between genders in…

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead…

This article reports on a sequential mixed-methods research study, which compared different approaches on how to guide students through a semester-long data science project. Four different methodologies, ranging from a traditional "just assign some intermediate milestones" to other more Agile methodologies, were first compared via a…

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places…

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment--flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students' amount of…

In a modern computing curriculum, large-project courses are essential to give students hands-on experience of working in a realistic software engineering project. Assessing such projects is, however, extremely challenging. There are various aspects and trade-offs of assessments that can affect course quality. Individual assessments may fairly…

Team projects are a way to expose students to conflicting project objectives, and "[t]here should be a strong real-world element...to ensure that the experience is realistic" [ACM/IEEE-CS 2015b]. Team projects provide an opportunity for students to put their education into practice and prepare them for their professional careers. The aim…

Educational technology offers several potential benefits for programming education. Still, to facilitate the technology properly, integration into a course must be carefully designed. In this article, we present a redesign of an object-oriented university-level programming course. In the redesign, a collaborative education tool was utilized to…

Team projects are a way to expose students to conflicting project objectives, and "[t]here should be a strong real-world element … to ensure that the experience is realistic" [ACM/IEEE-CS 2015b]. Team projects provide students an opportunity to put their education into practice and prepare them for their professional careers. The aim of…