Secondary computer science teachers who attended a special institute took part in a coordinated team software development exercise. The exercise was intended to provide experiences with collaborative learning in computer science, particularly to provide project design experiences and to allow students to practice new methodologies that could be…

Based on literature and student input, six major concerns have been noted for student programming progress for the academic class and work environment. The areas of concern are module driver programming, program documentation, output design, data design, data validation; and reusable code. Each area has been analyzed and examined in the teaching…

Purposes of this study were to determine: (1) if analogies and elaboration and placement of the analogies help novices learning a computer-programming language; (2) if students' mathematics ability influences programming learning; and (3) the interaction effects between analogy and mathematics ability. Subjects were 156 college students. Results…

Discusses software engineering and suggests necessary elements in a software engineering curriculum. Topics addressed include the importance of theory, project-oriented education, prototyping, exploratory programing, human-computer communication, thought models, distributed systems, parallel processing, documentation, testing and quality…

Reports research findings of an experimental design in which cooperative-learning strategies were applied to closed-lab instruction of computing concepts. SimCPU, a software package specially designed for closed-lab usage was used by 171 high school students of four classes. Results showed that collaboration enhanced learning and that blending…

Presents the underlying ideas of the Software Cost Reduction (SCR) approach to requirements specifications. Results of applying this approach to the teaching of programing to high school students indicate that students perform better in writing programs. An appendix provides two examples of how the method is applied to problem solving. (MDH)