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…

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,…

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…

The aim of the current study is to develop an adapted version of User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and evaluate a learning management system. Although there is a growing interest on User Experience, there are still limited resources (i.e. measurement tools or questionnaires) available to measure user experience of any products, especially…

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…

Educational materials of embedded systems are currently used in many educational institutions. However, they have difficulties in arousing the interest of students. One of the reasons is that a poor CPU (central processing unit), which has been loaded in the current materials, cannot execute the multimedia processing. In order to make the…

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…

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…

An e-learning discussion forum, an essential component of today's e-learning systems, offers a platform for social learning activities. However, as learners participate in the discussion forum, privacy emerges as a major concern. Privacy concerns in social learning activities originate from one learner's inability to convey a desired presentation…

This paper presents the usability evaluation of a digital systems laboratory class offered to distance-learning students. It details the way in which students can participate remotely in such a laboratory, the methodology employed in the usability assessment of the laboratory infrastructure (hardware and software), and also outlines the main…

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between…

Inside the globalisation era in which society is immersed, one of the current challenges for any educational system is to provide quality education. While some countries are linguistically homogeneous, many countries and regions display a wealth of linguistic diversity and it is essential to adapt the educational system to those realities. In…

Recognition of students' facial expressions can be used to understand their level of attention. In a traditional classroom setting, teachers guide the classes and continuously monitor and engage the students to evaluate their understanding and progress. Given the current popularity of e-learning environments, it has become important to assess the…

Mobile devices are changing the way people work and communicate. Most of the innovative devices offer the opportunity to integrate augmented reality in mobile applications, permitting the combination of the real world with virtual information. This feature can be particularly useful to enhance informal and formal didactic actions based on student…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of reflective thinking effects in the process of designing software on students' learning performances. The study contends that reflective thinking is a useful teaching strategy to improve learning performance among lower achieving students. Participants were students from two groups: Higher…