Standard methods of teaching an introductory course in computer science, designed to introduce computer programming as a tool for mathematicians and engineers at the university level, are unnecessarily complicated and difficult. They lack a common thread that unifies each unit of material and frequently make use of mathematical notation, technical…

With the strong link between programming and the underlying technology, the incorporation of computer technology into the teaching of a programming language course should be a natural progression. However, the abstract nature of programming can make such integration a difficult prospect to achieve. As a result, the main development tool, the…

Program visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical--often animated--and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of…

This paper investigates the relationship between learning style and programming achievement in two paradigms: imperative and functional. An imperative language achieves its effect by changing the value of variables by means of assignment statements while functional languages rely on evaluation of expressions rather than side-effects. Learning…

A 32-item self-efficacy scale for computer programming was developed, primed to the C++ programming language. The scale was administered to 421 students at the beginning and end of an introductory course in C++ programming. There was growth in self-efficacy between two administrations of the scale 12 weeks apart, particularly for students who…

This article describes the Australian Informatics Competition (AIC), a non-programming competition aimed at identifying students with potential in programming and algorithmic design. It is the first step in identifying students to represent Australia at the International Olympiad in Informatics. The main aim of the AIC is to increase awareness of…

Edutella is an RDF-based E-Learning P2P network that is aimed to accommodate heterogeneous learning resource metadata repositories in a P2P manner and further facilitate the exchange of metadata between these repositories based on RDF. Whereas Edutella provides RDF metadata repositories with a quite natural integration approach, XML metadata…

A day in Cape York, in the far north east of Australia, can change the life of a modern Australian. In that time, one can see hundreds of examples of rock art that are up to 36,000 years old, sharply contrasting the history of Indigenous people and the immigration of Europeans.One such visit led to a proposed collaboration between the Quinkan…

Describes "Glass-box Interpreter" a low-level program visualization tool called Bradman designed to provide a conceptual model of C program execution for novice programmers and makes visible aspects of the programming process normally hidden from the user. Presents an experiment that tests the efficacy of Bradman, and provides…

This chapter states and explains that a Learning Design is the result of a knowledge engineering process where knowledge and competencies, learning design and delivery models are constructed in an integrated framework. We present a general graphical language and a knowledge editor that has been adapted to support the construction of learning…

Recently, a lot of open source e-learning platforms have been offered for free in the Internet. We thus incorporate the intelligent diagnosis and assessment tool into an open software e-learning platform developed for programming language courses, wherein the proposed learning diagnosis assessment tools based on text mining and machine learning…

Various schools are struggling with the introduction of Object Oriented (OO) programming concepts and GUI (graphical user interfaces) within the traditional COBOL sequence. OO programming has been introduced in some of the curricula with languages such as C++, Smalltalk, and Java. Introducing OO programming into a typical COBOL sequence presents…

The objective of this study was to find the answers to two primary research questions: "Do students learn programming languages better when they are offered in a particular order, such as 4th generation languages before 3rd generation languages?"; and "Do students learn programming languages better when they are taken in separate semesters as…

The importance of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology family in the field of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) can not be denied. The Instructional Management Systems Project (IMS), for example, provides a learning resource XML binding specification. Considering this specification and other implementations using XML to represent…

Most electrical engineering and computer science undergraduate programs include at least one course on microcontrollers and assembly language programming. Some departments offer legacy courses in C programming, but few include C programming from an embedded systems perspective, where it is still regularly used. Distributed computing and parallel…