Computer Science (CS) Unplugged activities are designed to engage students with CS concepts. It is an active learning approach combining physical interaction with visual representation. This research article investigates the impact of CS Unplugged on students' understanding of the bubble sort algorithm. Algorithm visualization, traditionally…

Objectives: Physical computing systems are increasingly being integrated into secondary school science and STEM instruction, yet little is known about how teachers, especially those with little background and experience in computing, help students during the inevitable debugging moments that arise. In this article, we describe a framework,…

Global software engineering has changed the way software is developed today. To address the new challenges, many universities have launched specially tailored courses to train young professionals to work in globally distributed projects. However, a mere acknowledgment of the geographic, temporal, and cultural differences does not necessarily lead…

Literature on global employability signifies "enabling" learning environments where students encounter ill-formed and open-ended problems and are required to adapt and be creative. Varying forms of "projects," co-located and distributed, have populated computing curricula for decades and are generally deemed an answer to this…

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places…

This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving toward a practical and flexible study environment--flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students' amount of…

We define and describe the academic studio model for interdisciplinary, undergraduate, project-oriented education. This model brings faculty, students, and community partners together to investigate an openended academic question, and their collaboration yields an original product that represents their inquiry. The academic studio integrates agile…

POGIL has been successfully implemented in a scientific computing course to teach science students how to program in Python. Following POGIL guidelines, the authors have developed guided inquiry activities that lead student teams to discover and understand programming concepts. With each iteration of the scientific computing course, the authors…

Team projects are a way to expose students to conflicting project objectives, and "[t]here should be a strong real-world element … to ensure that the experience is realistic" [ACM/IEEE-CS 2015b]. Team projects provide students an opportunity to put their education into practice and prepare them for their professional careers. The aim of…

Peer Instruction (PI) is an active learning pedagogical technique. PI lectures present students with a series of multiple-choice questions, which they respond to both individually and in groups. PI has been widely successful in the physical sciences and, recently, has been successfully adopted by computer science instructors in lower-division,…

Greedy algorithms constitute an apparently simple algorithm design technique, but its learning goals are not simple to achieve.We present a didacticmethod aimed at promoting active learning of greedy algorithms. The method is focused on the concept of selection function, and is based on explicit learning goals. It mainly consists of an…

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming…

The value and the pitfalls of project and group work are well recognized. The principles and elements which apply to projects in general, apply to project-based courses. Thoughtful and detailed planning, understanding of the stakeholders and their needs, a good design, appropriate testing, monitoring and quality control and continual management…

Our approach to teaching introductory artificial intelligence (AI) unifies its diverse core topics through a theme of machine learning, and emphasizes how AI relates more broadly with computer science. Our work, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, involves the development, implementation, and testing of a suite of projects that…