The findings from an after-school program entitled Game Design through Mentoring and Collaboration (GDMC) funded by the National Science Foundation's Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program. A total of 139 middle and high schools students in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to learn the basics of…

This paper presents a methodology of discovering social action patterns in collaborative learning activities for use in improving activity design, and in particular for restructuring existing designs involving face-to-face social actions to enhance their social dynamics and thus better ensure the achievement of a specified aim. An activity in this…

Project MLeXAI [Machine Learning eXperiences in Artificial Intelligence (AI)] seeks to build a set of reusable course curriculum and hands on laboratory projects for the artificial intelligence classroom. In this article, we describe two game-based projects from the second phase of project MLeXAI: Robot Defense--a simple real-time strategy game…

Jmol is free, open source software for interactive molecular visualization. Since it is written in the Java[TM] programming language, it is compatible with all major operating systems and, in the applet form, with most modern web browsers. This article summarizes Jmol development and features that make it a valid and promising replacement for…

The primary purpose of the study was to determine if a treatment that concentrates on building programs from previously written modules can improve the decomposition processes of novice programmers in the C++ programming language and, hence, programming performance. For purposes of performance analysis, a subsample of 23 students was divided into…

Purpose: This paper aims to sketch the emerging notion of auto-adaptive software when applied to e-learning software. Design/methodology/approach: The study and the implementation of the auto-adaptive architecture are based on the operational framework "ActiveTutor" that is used for teaching the topic of computer science programming in first-grade…

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a new technology that is currently being extolled by many industry experts and software vendors. Potentially it represents a platform independent language for sharing information over networks in a way that is much more seamless than with previous technologies. It is extensible in that XML serves as a "meta"…

This paper builds on research into using multimedia and hypermedia as creative writing tools and reports on a study in using a hypermedia authoring program with middle-years students at an Australian secondary school. The study explored a classroom where collaborative work built on the technical facilities and expertise of young people. The paper…

A verbal and e-mail survey was conducted of 30 senior high teachers in Alberta who teach computer programming courses in the Career and Technology Studies curriculum, in order to ascertain what courses at the intermediate and advanced levels were being offered, what programming languages were being used, why teachers selected the particular…

An observation on teaching introductory programming courses on SLN for a period of two terms led me to believe that online students try various ways to solve a problem. In the beginning, I got the impression that some of their approaches for a solution were wrong; but after a little investigation, I found that some of the problem-solving…

Programming assignments are used to assess a student's understanding of the theoretical aspect of programming and their ability to put that theory into practice. When assigning programs for students to complete, it is necessary to make sure that the problem is well specified, realistic, yet is able to be completed in a relatively short period of…

Since the explosion in multimedia computing, educators have been trying to work their way towards integrated human-computer interaction. Consequently, a large number of multimedia tools have been created, always following the trend of simpler and easier multimedia development. After outlining the transition from hardcore programming to modern…

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) was used as a foundation to redesign a computer programming class for mechanical engineers, in which content was delivered with hybrid/distance technology. The effort confirmed the utility of CLT in course design. And it demonstrates that hybrid/distance learning is not merely a tool of convenience, but one, which, when…

The paper presents a part of authors' research results, they obtained within a wider research focused on possibilities to influence students' attitudes and approaches to individual subjects, mainly the less favourite ones. Following the empirically derived hierarchy of subjects identifying the degree of individual subjects popularity among…

This deliverable reports the technical and research development performed until M36 (January 2009) within tasks T5.2 and T5.4 of WP5 in the KP-Lab project, per the latest Description of Work (DoW) 3.2 [DoW3.2]. The described components are included in the KP-Lab Semantic Web Knowledge Middleware (SWKM) Prototype Release 3.0 software that takes…