There continues to be an increase in enrollments in various computing programs at academic institutions due to many job opportunities available in the information, communication, and technology sectors. This enrollment surge has presented several challenges in many Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT), and Software Engineering (SE)…

One of the most commonly cited theories in computing education research is cognitive load theory (CLT), which explains how learning is affected by the bottleneck of human working memory and how teaching may work around that limitation. The theory has evolved over a number of decades, addressing shortcomings in earlier versions; other issues remain…

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…

Software continues to affect a major part of our daily lives, including the way we use our phones, home appliances, medical devices, and cars. The pervasiveness of software has led to a growing demand for software developers over the next decade. To ensure the high quality of software developed in industry, students being trained in software…

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…

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…

Cooperative learning is a well-known instructional technique that has been applied with a wide variety of subject matter and a broad spectrum of populations. This article briefly reviews the principles of cooperative learning, and describes how these principles were incorporated into a comprehensive set of cooperative learning activities for a CS1…

Although teamwork has been identified as an essential skill for Computer Science (CS) graduates, these skills are identified as lacking by industry employers, which suggests a need for more proactive measures to teach and assess teamwork. In one CS course, students worked in teams to create a wiki solution to problem-based questions. Through a…

As software becomes more ubiquitous and complex, the cost of software bugs continues to grow at a staggering rate. To remedy this situation, there needs to be major improvement in the knowledge and application of software validation techniques. Although there are several software validation techniques, software testing continues to be one of the…

Previous studies indicate that the use of pair programming has beneficial effects on student learning. In this article, we present a controlled study that directly measured students' acquisition of individual programming skills using laboratory practice (in which students programmed individually under exam conditions). Additionally, we analyzed…

As collaborative learning in general, and pair programming in particular, has become widely adopted in computer science education, so has the use of pedagogical visualization tools for facilitating collaboration. However, there is little theory on collaborative learning with visualization, and few studies on their effect on each other. We build on…

This article provides an overview of the challenges in implementing a game development course with limited resources in computing curricula. An approach to a holistic game development course is outlined in terms of its organization, software, and instructional methods. The course had 23 students enrolled in its first offering and was…