This study investigates the bully and the bullied from 1950 to 2010. It begins by presenting a historical background of each decade with the major historical events that defined our culture. Each decade can be characterized by a particular zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. During each decade, popular movies and television programs that provided…

Two studies were conducted to examine the use of grounded embodied pedagogy, construction of Imaginary Worlds (Study 1), and context of instructional materials (Study 2) for developing learners' Computational Thinking (CT) Skills and Concept knowledge during the construction of digital artifacts using Scratch, a block-based programming…

Australian "Play School" is a children's television programme developed in collaboration with early childhood educators. It is screened free to air across Australia. Two hundred and twenty-four adult carers of young children aged 1-8 years completed an online survey via a link on the "Play School" website. The survey addressed…

Computer Science (CS) is a relatively new disciple and how best to introduce it to new students remains an open question. Likewise, the identification of appropriate instructional strategies for the diverse topics that constitute the average curriculum remains open to debate. One approach considered by a number of practitioners in CS education…

This article provides insight into how computing majors experience the process of doing programming assignments in their first programming course. This grounded theory study sheds light on the various processes and contexts through which students constantly assess their self-efficacy as a programmer. The data consists of a series of four…

Automatic item generation represents a relatively new but rapidly evolving research area where cognitive and psychometric theories are used to produce tests that include items generated using computer technology. Automatic item generation requires two steps. First, test development specialists create item models, which are comparable to templates…

This article discusses audience responses to a children's soap opera produced and broadcast in Kenya. It examines the evaluation process in relation to qualitative audience research within Cultural Studies. It challenges an Entertainment-Education model of media as vehicles for messages and links strongly with Communication for Social Change…

For a period, in the run up to the election (2007-2008) and the months after the election, the name "Obama" signified hope for millions, not just in America but across the world. As the hope turned to disappointment, the financial crisis deepened and the Arab Spring renewed a call for a "humanity" that could transcend the differences of nations…

As a fifth-grade mathematics teacher, the author tries to create authentic problem-solving activities that connect to the world in which his students live. He discovered a natural connection to his students' real world at a computer camp. A friend introduced him to Alice, a computer application developed at Carnegie Mellon, under the leadership of…

Maps such as concept maps and knowledge maps are often used as learning materials. These maps have nodes and links, nodes as key concepts and links as relationships between key concepts. From a map, the user can recognize the important concepts and the relationships between them. To build concept or knowledge maps, domain experts are needed.…

This study investigates whether a curriculum supplement organized as a sequence of teacher-led literacy activities using digital content from public educational television programs can improve early literacy outcomes of low-income preschoolers. The study sample was 436 children in 80 preschool classrooms in California and New York. Preschool…

Bioinformatics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field that integrates computer science, mathematics, biology, and information technology to manage, analyze, and understand biological, biochemical and biophysical information. We present our experience in teaching an interdisciplinary course, Introduction to Bioinformatics, which was developed…

Teaching computer programming to young children has been considered difficult because of its abstract and complex nature. The objectives of this study are (1) to investigate whether an innovative educational technology tool called Scratch could enable young children to learn abstract knowledge of computer programming while creating multimedia…

Software has an important role in supporting scientific work. This dissertation studies teams that build scientific software, focusing on the way that they determine what the software should do. These requirements engineering processes are investigated through three case studies of climate science software projects. The Earth System Modeling…

The present work has its focus on university-level engineering education students that do not intend to major in computer science but still have to take a mandatory programming course. Phenomenography and variation theory are applied to empirical data from a study of students' conceptions of computer programming. A phenomenographic outcome space…