Transitioning to university is recognised as a challenging endeavour for commencing students. For commencing Computer Science students specifically, evidence suggests a link between poor performance in introductory technical courses, such as programming, and high attrition rates. Building resilience in students, particularly at the start of their…

In our age of big data and growing computational power, versatility in data analysis is important. This study presents a flexible way to combine statistics and machine learning for data analysis of a large-scale educational survey. The authors used statistical and machine learning methods to explore German students' attitudes towards information…

In higher education, a limited number of studies have been conducted on the relationship between lifestyle and creativity and dating back to more than 50 years ago. This study investigates the up-to-date results of the relationship between university students' lifestyles and their creative ideation. The data was collected two times in order to…

The general growth in public affairs programs offering hybrid and online courses to reach a wide variety of students, along with the necessity of doing so during a global health pandemic, calls for an investigation of best practices in teaching public affairs statistics and research-oriented courses. These courses often require the use of a…

Causal inference regarding a hypothesized mediation mechanism relies on the assumptions that there are no omitted pretreatment confounders (i.e., confounders preceding the treatment) of the treatment-mediator, treatment-outcome, and mediator-outcome relationships, and there are no posttreatment confounders (i.e., confounders affected by the…

In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Jeffrey Harring and Ms. Tessa Johnson introduce the linear mixed effects (LME) model as a flexible general framework for simultaneously modeling continuous repeated measures data with a scientifically defensible function that adequately summarizes both individual change as well as the average response. The module…

In this study, the aim is to evaluate the problem-solving processes in the understanding of problems and to determine and provide strategies, demonstration, expression and problem-writing dimensions in a numerical analysis course for engineering students. The quantitative data and qualitative data were interpreted using exploratory sequential…

Due the wideness of the term Physical Computing, there is a need for a better structure of this topic. This paper is about an approach of structuring this field by finding attributes of different physical computing devices which can be used in class. Those attributes are meant to enforce teachers as well as researchers to analyze different devices…

At the heart of van der Linden's approach to automated test assembly (ATA) is a linear programming/integer programming (LP/IP) problem. A variety of IP solvers are available, ranging in cost from free to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In this paper, I compare several approaches to solving the underlying IP problem. These approaches range from…

Bitcoin is the first major decentralized cryptocurrency with wide acceptance. A core technological innovation of Bitcoin is blockchain, a secure and pseudonymous general ledger that stores every Bitcoin transaction. Blockchain has received enormous attention from both the commercial and academic worlds, and it is generally recognized as the…

Today's software industry requires individuals who are proficient in as many programming languages as possible. Structured query language (SQL), as an adopted standard, is no exception, as it is the most widely used query language to retrieve and manipulate data. However, the process of learning SQL turns out to be challenging. The need for a…

In recent years, the number of students who have chosen computer science related undergraduate departments has decreased rapidly. Moreover, students who prefer computer science and programming departments appear to be unsuccessful in programming classes due to the complexity and frustrating difficulties of programming learning. One of the…

Ontologies are emerging as best representation techniques for knowledge based context domains. The continuing need for interoperation, collaboration and effective information retrieval has lead to the creation of semantic web with the help of tools and reasoners which manages personalized information. The future of semantic web lies in an ontology…

Internet of Things ("IoT") systems are complex, asynchronous solutions often comprised of various software and hardware components developed in isolation of each other. These components function with different degrees of reliability and performance over an inherently unreliable network, the Internet. Many IoT systems are developed within…

The emphasis on programming and robotics owing to the unfolding of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the African continent has led the South African National Department of Education to propose a new subject in Grades R to 9. Hence, the training and development of pre-service teachers is crucial so that they can respond to the skills needed in…