Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing…

Pair programming, as part of the Agile Development process, has noted benefits in professional software development scenarios. These successes have led to a rise in use of pair programming in educational settings, particularly in Computer Science 1 (CS1). Specifically, McDowell et al. [2006] has shown that students using pair programming in CS1 do…

This case focuses on learning by applying the four integrating mechanisms of Nonaka's knowledge creation theory: socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. In general, such knowledge creation and internalization (i.e., learning) is critical to database students since they will be expected to apply their specialized database…

This article describes the design and delivery of a compulsory course in packaged software at vocational schools in Taiwan. A course website was devised and deployed to supplement learning activities in the traditional classroom. A series of quasi-experiments was conducted with innovative instructional designs, that is, web-enabled problem-based…

Instructors in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science have developed innovative methods to teach digital logic circuits. These methods attempt to increase student learning, satisfaction, and retention. Although there are readily accessible and accepted means for measuring satisfaction and retention, there are no widely…

With funding from NSF, the Prime the Pipeline Project (P[cube]) is responding to the need to strengthen the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline from high school to college by developing and evaluating the scientific village strategy and the culture it creates. The scientific village, a community of high school…

The need for professional programmers in embedded applications has become critical for industry growth. This need has increased the popularity of embedded software design courses, which are resource-intensive and space-limited in traditional real lab-based instruction. To overcome geographic and time barriers in enhancing practical skills that…

Involving two or more academic subjects, interdisciplinary studies aim to blend together broad perspectives, knowledge, skills, and epistemology in an educational setting. By focusing on topics or questions too broad for a single discipline to cover, these studies strive to draw connections between seemingly different fields. Cases on…

Current educational initiatives encourage the use of authentic learning environments to realistically prepare students for jobs in a constantly changing world. Many students of the Millennial generation may be social media savvy. However, what can be said about learning conditions and student readiness for active, reflective and collaborative…

This paper investigates students' perceptions of their acquisition of knowledge management skills, namely thinking and team-building skills, resulting from the integration of various resources and technologies into an entirely team-based, online upper level distributed computing (DC) information systems (IS) course. Results seem to indicate that…

SystemC is a system-level design and simulation language based on C++. We've been using SystemC for computer organization and design projects for the past several years. Because SystemC is embedded in C++ it contains the powerful abstraction mechanisms of C++ not found in traditional hardware description languages, such as support for…

Many students experience difficulties learning to program. They find learning to program in the object-oriented paradigm particularly challenging. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting…

Learning to program is difficult for novices, even for those undergraduates who have majored in computer science. The study described in this paper has investigated the effects of game strategy and preference-matching on novice learners' flow experience and performance in learning to program using an experiential gaming activity. One hundred and…

The defectiveness of the effectiveness of the Hungarian general education revealed in the PISA survey appears in the higher education as well. The "Introduction to Informatics" subject has one of the lowest exam results among the students of the College of Nyíregyháza majoring in Computer Program Designer and Teacher of Computer Science.…

Organizations worldwide have been turning to Six Sigma program (SSP) to eliminate the defects in their products or drive out the variability in their processes to attain a competitive advantage in their marketplace. An effective certification program has been touted as a major contributor to successful implementation of SSP. An effective…