We discuss the design, creation and implementation of an instructional game for use in a high school poetry class following a commitment to an educational game design principle of "alignment". We studied groups of instructional designers and an interactive fiction computer game they built. The game was implemented in a 9th grade English classroom…

This article critiques learning design as a representation for sharing and developing practice, based on synthesis of three projects. Starting with the findings of the Mod4L Models of Practice project, it argues that the technical origins of learning design, and the consequent focus on structure and sequence, limit its usefulness for sharing…

The potential influence of violent video games on youth violence remains an issue of concern for psychologists, policymakers and the general public. Although several prospective studies of video game violence effects have been conducted, none have employed well validated measures of youth violence, nor considered video game violence effects in…

In the 21st century, the ubiquitous nature of technology today is evident and to a large extent, most of us benefit from the modern convenience brought about by technology. Yet to be technology literate, it is argued that learning to program still plays an important role. One area of research in programming concerns the identification of…

The residue number system (RNS) has been an important research field in computer arithmetic for many decades, mainly because of its carry-free nature, which can provide high-performance computing architectures with superior delay specifications. Recently, research on RNS has found new directions that have resulted in the introduction of efficient…

Research shows that female and male students in undergraduate computer science programs view computer culture differently. Female students are interested more in the use of computers than in doing programming, whereas male students see computer science mainly as a programming activity. The overall purpose of our research was not to find new…

There was a time when school districts showed little interest in storing or backing up their data to remote servers. Nothing seemed less secure than handing off data to someone else. But in the last few years the buzz around cloud storage has grown louder, and the idea that data backup could be provided as a service has begun to gain traction in…

This article distills a discussion about the goals, mechanisms, and effects of three environments which aim to support the acquisition and development of computing concepts (problem solving and programming) in pre-University and non-technical students: Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch. The conversation started in a special session on the topic at the…

This paper presents a methodology for the design of intelligent learning environments. We recognise that in the educational technology field, theory development and system-design should be integrated and rely on an iterative process that addresses: (a) the difficulty to elicit precise, concise, and operationalized knowledge from "experts" and (b)…

In this study half of 52 sixth graders learned to program in MSWLogo and the other half in Drape. An analysis of students' test scores revealed that Drape (an iconic language) seemed to have a steeper learning curve than MSWLogo (a textual language). However, as students gradually became more familiar with either language, the difference in…

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming…

This article presents the design and development of i*CATch, a construction kit for physical and wearable computing that was designed to be scalable, plug-and-play, and to provide support for iterative and exploratory learning. It consists of a standardized construction interface that can be adapted for a wide range of soft textiles or electronic…

The acquisition of programming skills specially in introductory programming courses poses an important challenge for freshmen students of engineering programs. These courses require students to devote a sustained effort during the whole course and a failure to do so may contribute to not passing the course. However, it is difficult for the…

The research reported in this article formed part of an internationally funded project about the empowerment of Information Technology (IT) teachers in economically deprived rural schools in the North-West and KwaZulu-Natal provinces in South Africa. The current paper focused on the use of self-directed metacognitive (SDM) questioning in a pair…

Advances in technology have caused high schools to update their computer science curricula; however there has been little analogous attention to technology-related education in middle schools. With respect to computer-related knowledge and skills, middle school students are at a critical phase in life, exploring individualized education options…