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This paper describes and evaluates aspects of a professional development programme for existing CS teachers in secondary schools (PLAN C) which was designed to support teachers at a time of substantial curricular change. The paper’s particular focus is on the formation of a teacher professional development network across several hundred teachers and a wide geographical area. Evidence from a series of observations and teacher surveys over a two-year period is analysed with respect to the project’s programme theory in order to illustrate not only whether it worked as intended, by why. Results indicate that the PLAN C design has been successful in increasing teachers’ professional confidence and appears to have catalysed powerful change in attitudes to learning. Presentation of challenging pedagogical content knowledge and conceptual frameworks, high-quality teacher-led professional dialogue, along with the space for reflection and classroom trials, triggered examination of the teachers’ own current ...

In this theory paper, we explore the concept of translanguaging from bilingual education, and its implications for teaching and learning programming and computing in especially computer science (CS...

Pair programming is a software development technique with many cited benefits in learning and teaching. However, it is reported that novice programmers find several barriers to pairing up, typically due to the added communication that is required of this approach. This paper will present a literature review discussing the issue of communication, and through a series of observations with industry-based pairs, will derive a set of guidelines which aim to help novice pairs experience better communication within their pairs. An evaluation of the guidelines with undergraduate students is then reported, showing that exposure to these guidelines improved the self-perceived communication experience of novice pairs.

Submitted by Christina Chavez (flach@ufba.br) on 2020-12-07T17:42:07Z No. of bitstreams: 1 preprint_CSE_2015-DeboraCoelho-journal.pdf: 846247 bytes, checksum: ceeb12b24683cb10b1345563f2b7e27e (MD5) Approved for entry into archive by Solange Rocha (soluny@gmail.com) on 2020-12-10T23:18:13Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 preprint_CSE_2015-DeboraCoelho-journal.pdf: 846247 bytes, checksum: ceeb12b24683cb10b1345563f2b7e27e (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-10T23:18:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 preprint_CSE_2015-DeboraCoelho-journal.pdf: 846247 bytes, checksum: ceeb12b24683cb10b1345563f2b7e27e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-05-12 Context: It is common practice in academia to have students work with “toy” projects in software engineering (SE) courses. One way to make such courses more realistic and reduce the gap between academic courses and industry needs is getting students involved in open source projects (OSP) with faculty supervision. Objective: This study aims to summarize the literature on how OSP have been used to facilitate students’ learning of SE. Method: A systematic mapping study was undertaken by identifying, filtering and classifying primary studies using a predefined strategy. Results: 72 papers were selected and classified. The main results were: (a) most studies focused on comprehensive SE courses, although some dealt with specific areas; (b) the most prevalent approach was the traditional project method; (c) studies’ general goals were: learning SE concepts and principles by using OSP, learning open source software or both; (d) most studies tried out ideas in regular courses within the curriculum; (e) in general, students had to work with predefined projects; (f) there was a balance between approaches where instructors had either inside control or no control on the activities performed by students; (g) when learning was assessed, software artefacts, reports and presentations were the main instruments used by teachers, while surveys were widely used for students’ self-assessment; (h) most studies were published in the last seven years. Conclusions: The resulting map gives an overview of the existing initiatives in this context and shows gaps where further research can be pursued. London