The reality show "The Amazing Race" serves as a useful text for the cultural geography classroom. As competitors travel the world, they complete challenging tasks designed to be both educational and entertaining. Audiences see actual images from destinations around the world and learn about the unique cultures of these places. They also…

Snowflakes falling in Brisbane, Australia would likely make news headlines during any season of a given year, even during winter. Year 8 students at Ormiston College which is located in Brisbane, have made their own snowflakes--of a kind. Using the programming language Scratch, all Year 8 Mathematics students wrote code to construct Swedish…

This article is written to share teaching ideas about using commonly available computer applications--a spreadsheet, "The Geometer's Sketchpad", and "Wolfram Alpha"--to explore three classic and historically significant problems from the probability theory. These ideas stem from the authors' work with prospective economists,…

Internationally mathematical modeling is garnering more attention for the benefits associated with it. Mathematical modeling can develop students' communication skills and the ability to demonstrate understanding through different representations. With the increased attention on mathematical modeling, there is a need for more curricula to be…

Previous research indicates that understanding the state of learning motivation enables researchers to deeply understand students' learning processes. Studies have shown that visual programming languages use graphical code, enabling learners to learn effectively, improve learning effectiveness, increase learning fun, and offering various other…

This technology report outlines a robust and easy to assemble magnetic stirrer that is programmable. All of the parts are recycled from obsolete computer hardware except the Arduino microcontroller and motor driver, at a total cost of around $40. This multidisciplinary approach introduces microcontrollers to students and grants the opportunity to…

A science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-influenced classroom requires learning activities that provide hands-on experiences with technological tools to encourage problem-solving skills (Brophy et al. in "J Eng Educ" 97(3):369-387, 2008; Mataric et al. in "AAAI spring symposium on robots and robot venues: resources for AI…

In this paper we investigate whether computer programming has an impact on high school student's reasoning skills, problem solving and self-efficacy in Mathematics. The quasi-experimental design was adopted to implement the study. The sample of the research comprised 66 high school students separated into two groups, the experimental and the…

Technology makes up our daily lives and is a part of everything we do. The tech job market is expanding with more and more jobs needing to be filled by those with the necessary qualifications. Students are realizing the vast opportunities a career in technology can offer them and many are making the conscience decision to major in a technical…

Over the summer of 2015, the Plug-In Studio (a new media art collective) collaborated with a group of African American teen artists from Chicago's South Side on a series of art videogames. The teen artists selected issues important to them as the subjects for the games: White privilege, racial profiling, police misconduct, and others. Working…

We describe a method for analyzing student data from online programming exercises. Our approach uses contingency tables that combine whether or not a student answered an online exercise correctly with the number of attempts that the student made on that exercise. We use this method to explore the relationship between student performance on online…

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has enabled new research to analyze typical behaviors of learners. In this paper, we investigate whether this research is generalizable to other courses that are backed by a learning management system (LMS) as MOOCs are. Building on methods developed by others, we characterize individual…

The objective of the study was to examine the direct, indirect, and total effects of computer uses on math achievements, by paying particular attention to immigrant students. The study focused on two types of computer uses: computer use for programming and computer use for practice. By using the data from Program for International Student…

Aspect-oriented software design (AOSD) enables better and more complete separation of concerns in software-intensive systems. By extracting aspect code and relegating crosscutting functionality to aspects, software engineers can improve the maintainability of their code by reducing code tangling and coupling of code concerns. Further, the number…

Various methods and tools have been proposed to overcome the learning obstacles for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). However, it remains difficult especially for novice learners. The problem may be not only adopting an instructional method, but also an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Learners employ IDEs as a means to solve programming…