The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth's book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught,…

The increased trend of incorporating computer programming in the basic education system across countries requires the training of new educators. However, the current effort to increase the number of teachers teaching programming is through professional development programs for computer science (CS) teachers and from other content areas. Meanwhile,…

In the championship playoffs of professional learning tools, this author contends that there is a clear-cut victor. Customizable, platform-agnostic, able to circumvent filters--both browser and network-imposed--RSS is the best professional learning tool. Reading sites via RSS has appeal for those who want the raw information. With a well-honed…

This paper presents a novel instructional model for e-learning and an evaluation study to determine the effectiveness of this model for teaching Java language programming to information technology specialists working for the Spanish Public Administration. This is a general-purpose model that combines objectivist and constructivist learning…

In this paper we follow up "Developing Growing Need for Soft-Skills in IT Professionals," a paper from the 2003 ASCUE Conference. In that paper we examined the need for "soft-skills" by information technology professionals. In the current economic climate, IT outsourcing is becoming increasingly popular. Our Columbus, Indiana…