In organizations that are seeking a high degree of maturity, it is necessary to achieve a statistical control of software processes and to know their behavior and operational performance. The approach adopted for the research involves reading articles and experience performance reports, practical cases, discussion, the use of games and simulators,…

In psychology departments in South Africa, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) is routinely used for quantitative analysis. While SPSS has a user-friendly interface, it does not permit application of some of the more sophisticated analytic approaches and therefore has limited functionality. The programming language R can perform…

The teaching and learning of programming are often considered a difficult topic for both teachers and students, due to its complexity and abstract nature. The traditional teaching approaches are unable to contribute substantially to the development of the necessary cognitive models by the students, producing high rates of failure and dropout in…

Although the learning of programming language is critical in science and technology education, it might be difficult for some students, especially novices. One possible reason might be the fact that programming language, especially for three-dimensional (3D) applications, is too complex and abstract for these students to understand. Programming…

We report on an intervention in which informal programming labs were switched to a weekly machine-evaluated test for a second year Data Structures and Algorithms module. Using the online HackerRank system, we investigated whether greater constructive alignment between course content and the exam would result in lower failure rates. After…

This paper presents the results of two educational experiments carried out to determine whether the process of specifying requirements (catalog-based reuse as opposed to conventional specification) has an impact on effectiveness and productivity in co-located and distributed software development environments. The participants in the experiments…

Concept mapping is a method of graphical learning that can be beneficial as a study method for concept linking and organization. Concept maps, which provide an elegant, easily understood representation of an expert's domain knowledge, are tools for organizing and representing knowledge. These tools have been used in educational environments to…

Conceptual modeling is one of the most important learning topics for higher education and secondary education. The goal of conceptual modeling in this research is to draw a class diagram using given notation to satisfy the given requirements. In this case, the subjects are asked to choose concepts to satisfy the given requirements and to correctly…

Agile methods such as Scrum that emphasize technical, communication, and teamwork skills have been practiced by IT professionals to effectively deliver software products of good quality. The same methods combined with pedagogies of engagement can potentially be used in the setting of higher education to promote effective group learning in software…

This study investigates how second language (L2) fluency is influenced by two factors: Pre-task planning and content familiarity. Planning was adopted as a between-participant variable, combined with content familiarity as a within-participant variable, in a 2 × 2 split-plot factorial design. Nineteen measures of fluency phenomena, constituting…

The increasing complexity of the new breed of distributed intelligent systems, such as the Internet of Things, which require a diversity of languages and protocols, can only be tamed with design and programming best practices. Interest is also growing for including the human factor, as advocated by the "ambient intelligence" (AmI)…

The teaching of entrepreneurship is currently a fundamental pillar in the construction of social responsibility with strong impact on the future economic development of society. The use of serious games in the entrepreneurship field is a way of encouraging students' motivation to become entrepreneurs and develop their skills in the field. In this…

Programming tools are being used in education to teach computer science to children as young as 5 years old. This research aims to explore young children's approaches to programming in two tools with contrasting programming interfaces, ScratchJr and Lightbot, and considers the impact of programming approaches on developing computational thinking.…

Carrying out real-world software projects in their academic studies helps students to understand what they will face in industry, and to experience first-hand the challenges involved when working collaboratively. Most of the instructional strategies used to help students take advantage of these activities focus on supporting agile programming,…

This study uses homogeneity in personal learning styles and heterogeneity in subject knowledge for collaborative learning group decomposition indicating that groups are "mixed" in nature. Homogeneity within groups was formed using K-means clustering and greedy search, whereas heterogeneity imbibed using agenda-driven search. For checking…