Design problems are often ill-structured as the requirements are broadly defined and have multiple correct solutions. Experts solve such problems by applying various cognitive and metacognitive skills before the formal specifications and solution designs are documented. Novices often need help solving ill-structured design problems as they lack…

The increasing demand for a diverse pool of computing talent combined with a persistent shortage of skilled workers has engendered a need to support students pursuing Computer Science (CS) careers. Students often cite social isolation and lack of support as reasons for withdrawing from computing programs. This is especially true for those from…

Objectives: Faculty new to teaching operating systems or those looking to refresh their course need to understand the state of the art in operating system education. Toward this goal, we conducted a survey of operating system instructors to understand how they approach teaching the course and what textbook and software platforms they use in their…

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…

We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services and the standard Hadoop API. Using the standard API, students directly experienced the quality of industrial big-data tools. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware,…

Training professionals to design and produce interactive systems requires the use of well thought-out training scenarios. Indeed, it is essential to consider pedagogical forms whose objective is providing learners with field experience. It is also necessary to motivate learners to learn about subjects that sometimes seem distant from their…

This article reviews successful educational experiences in using program and algorithm visualizations (PAVs). First, we survey a total of 18 PAV systems that were subject to 33 evaluations. We found that half of the systems have only been tested for usability, and those were shallow inspections. The rest were evaluated with respect to their…

One of the goals of using robots in introductory programming courses is to increase motivation among learners. There have been several types of robots that have been used extensively in the classroom to teach a variety of computer science concepts. A more recently introduced robot designed to teach programming to novice students is the Institute…

There is an active research community concentrating on visualizations of algorithms taught in CS1 and CS2 courses. These visualizations can help students to create concrete visual images of the algorithms and their underlying concepts. Not only "fundamental algorithms" can be visualized, but also algorithms used in compilers. Visualizations that…

Rich, interactive eLearning tools receive a lot of attention nowadays from both practitioners and researchers. However, broader dissemination of these tools is hindered by the technical difficulties of their integration into existing platforms. This article explores the technical and conceptual problems of using several interactive educational…

PatternCoder is a software tool to aid student understanding of class associations. It has a wizard-based interface which allows students to select an appropriate binary class association or design pattern for a given problem. Java code is then generated which allows students to explore the way in which the class associations are implemented in a…

jGRASP has three integrated approaches for interacting with its dynamic viewers for data structures: debugger, workbench, and text-based interactions that allow individual Java statements and expressions to be executed/evaluated. These approaches can be used together to provide a complementary set of interactions with the dynamic viewers. Data…

Information technology teams are often partially distributed teams (PDTs). A PDT consists of two or more subteams that are separated geographically. This article describes research focused on the use of PDTs to engage students in "real world" IT team learning about the subject matter while also teaching them the skills they will need to work in…

As collaborative learning in general, and pair programming in particular, has become widely adopted in computer science education, so has the use of pedagogical visualization tools for facilitating collaboration. However, there is little theory on collaborative learning with visualization, and few studies on their effect on each other. We build on…

Online learning material that students use by themselves is one of the typical usages of algorithm animation (AA). Thus, the integration of algorithm animations into hypertext is seen as an important topic today to promote the usage of algorithm animation in teaching. This article presents an algorithm animation viewer implemented purely using…