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Service-Learning (SL) is a powerful methodology to acquire competences and values in Higher Education. However, there is still no widespread use in Information and Computer Science (ICS) degrees where most of the subjects are focused on the development of theoretical and practical contents purely related to technical competences. In this paper, we show the structure of a SL methodology to develop Bachelor's Thesis: 1) definition of proposals considering all the competencies of the Bachelor's Thesis subject and the needs of entities; 2) development of applications using agile methodologies, and 3) assessment of the SL experience from students, entities and professors. We present an experience developed in the 2019/2020 academic year with two entities devoted to disfavoured people. The results show both the high technical and professional quality of the projects and the high satisfaction of entities and students. We hope that the development of applications with the collaboration of non-profit entities allows the acquisition of both specific and transversal competencies on ICS degrees at the same time enhancing the development of useful professional ones.

In a course of the degree of computer science, the programming project has changed from individual to teamed work, tentatively in couples (pair programming). Students have full freedom to team up with minimum intervention from teachers. The analysis of the working groups made indicates that students do not tend to associate with students with a similar academic performance, perhaps because general cognitive parameters do not drive the choice of academic partners. Pair programming seems to give great results, so the efforts of future research in this field should focus precisely on how these pairs are formed, underpinning the mechanisms of human social interactions. [Paper presented at the International Conference on University Teaching and Innovation (CIDUI): Learning and Teaching Innovation Impacts (9th, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain, Jul 5-7 2016.)]

European universities are involved in a process of change to ensure they are more comparable, compatible and coherent systems of higher education inside the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In addition, scouting takes more than 100 years educating young people around the world. This non-formal education is based on values and its method is near the same for more than 30 million people along more than 100 years. The main goal of this paper is to show the analogy and the relationship between the educational model proposed by scouting and the educational model proposed by the EHEA, as well as to present a real case study where the scout method has been implemented in a health care software engineering subject at the informatics and computer science school in the University of Malaga. Along this paper, educational models, their analogies and relationships will be presented. Finally, the case study will be presented, developed and evaluated.

The subject of computer science (CS) and computer science education (CSE) has relatively recently arisen as a subject for inclusion within the compulsory school curriculum. Up to this present time, a major focus of technologies in the school curriculum has in many countries been on applications of existing technologies into subject practice (both software such as office applications, and hardware such as robots and sensors). Through uses of these applications, information and communications technologies (ICT) have focused on activities to support subject and topic learning (across wide age and subject ranges). Very recently, discussions for including computers in the curriculum have shifted to a much greater focus on computing and CS, more concerned with uses of and development of programming, together with fundamental principles of problem-solving and creativity. This paper takes a policy analysis approach; it considers evidence of current implementation of CSE in school curricula, the six main arguments for wider-scale introduction of the subject, the implications for researchers, schools, teachers and learners, the state of current discussions in a range of countries, and evidence of outcomes of CSE in compulsory curricula. The paper concludes by raising key questions for the future from a policy analysis perspective.

Massive Open Online Courses and e-learning represent the future of the teaching-learning processes through the development of Information and Communication Technologies. They are the response to the new education needs of society. However, this future also presents many challenges such as the processing of online forums when a huge number of messages are generated. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of the subject, but the difficulties in following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may produce the opposite effect. In this paper, we propose a computational method for enabling the educational process in huge online learning communities. This method analyzes the forum information through Natural Language Processing techniques and extract the main topics discussed. The results generated improves the management of the forums, increases the effectiveness of the teachers' explanations and reduces the time spent by students to follow the course. The proposal has been complemented with a real case study that shows promising results.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is as full of challenges as it is of possibilities. We will explore the challenges while seeking realistic solutions as eight Computer Science professors teach their subjects through English for the first time. We hope to gain insights into the bilingual classroom at the university level where teacher training can aid in professional development. Kevin Haines (2017) has posed the question about policies, principles and practice in bilingual settings, suggesting that we still need to address the challenging question: "who will support the teachers?" In this paper we will observe problems and solutions to bilingual teaching from the ethnographic point of view of action research. We hold that research in education must make the move toward a more qualitative assessment. As researchers, perhaps we need to describe less and "do" more by putting our research into action.

In the Master's of Telecommunication Engineering program at the University of Deusto, Spain, courses in communication circuit design, electronic instrumentation, advanced systems for signal processing and radiocommunication systems allow students to acquire concepts crucial to the fields of electronics and communication. During the educational project presented in this paper, students build a continuous-wave frequency-modulation (CWFM) Doppler radar system from components as simple as ordinary cocoa cans and common electronics components placed on a breadboard without any soldering. One of the goals of the project is to stimulate students' interest in building an entire, completely functional communication system that integrates the knowledge acquired in the various courses and whose functioning they can check in real scenarios. This paper describes this learning project and the ways in which it helps students understand and connect all the concepts that underlie a fully operative communications system, thus meeting the competencies and learning outcomes of the courses involved in the project.

In this paper we present a pilot study to improve the learning process on distance learning Engineering master's degrees. We propose an activity where the students individually produce a video in which they explain the solution to one of their assignments. They then receive the teacher's feedback and are acquainted with the assessment rubric. Finally, they produce a second version of the video, the assessment of which is the basis for their overall mark. The results of the study show that students improved their ability to give oral presentations.

This paper presents an analysis of introducing active methodologies in the Computer Architecture course taught in the second year of the Computer Engineering Bachelor's degree program at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain. The paper reports the experience from three academic years, 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014, in which three types of data were considered for analysis: students' dedication, as measured by time spent on the project, their marks, and their level of satisfaction. The study shows that about 86% of students are satisfied with the teaching methodology and are willing to continue using it in future courses. The study also shows that the active methodologies used contribute to the students' cross-curricular training and do not generate any great increase in student workload. Finally, a statistical analysis of the evolution of student performance showed that marks improved to a statistically significant extent after introducing active methodologies.

The University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, has the objective of making all the teaching material generated by its teachers freely available. To attain this objective, it encourages the development of Open Educational Resources, especially videos. This paper presents an experience of recording lectures and generating the corresponding videos as a step toward this objective. The core system used to record lectures is Opencast Matterhorn (free and open-source customizable software to support the management of educational audio and video content). This paper also focuses on the study and analysis of the students' experience of using recorded videos as support for their learning process. This case study was carried out in the Fall 2012 offering of the first-year Computer Architecture course in the University of Vigo's Telecommunication Technologies Engineering program. Finally, the paper addresses students' level of satisfaction with the recorded lectures and gives students' opinions on the use of these videos.

Contribution: This paper describes a highly flexible design for a master's-level server administration course that uses updated technologies, addresses the most important course design challenges and extracts useful feedback from student work. The main contribution of this design is eliminating the self-regulation challenge students encounter in similar highly flexible computer-related courses. This is attributed to the introduction of orientation lectures and a competitive element; these may have helped students to achieve their goals on time. Background: The Web server administration course on the master's of the Web engineering program was intended to inculcate a series of competences, such as common administration techniques, procedures to increase security, efficient website deployment, and an introduction to clusters and infrastructure deployment automation. The course generally failed to transmit these competencies effectively; complaints were made about the difficulty of the course and the low applicability of its contents. Intended Outcomes: The design facilitates students finding assessment activities that better suit their profiles or previous experience, and enables them to customize their assessment, thus encouraging them and giving future value to their work. Application Design: The course design maximizes assessment flexibility by providing students with many optional activities from which to choose. It also promotes a healthy competitive spirit to improve student's motivation and results. Findings: Complaints about the difficulty or lack of applicability were no longer made. The course is highly valued by the students, achieving a very high pass rate and average score.

Jutge.org is an open educational online programming judge designed for students and instructors, featuring a repository of problems that is well organized by courses, topics, and difficulty. Internally, Jutge.org uses a secure and efficient architecture and integrates modern verification techniques, formal methods, static code analysis, and data mining. Jutge.org has exhaustively been used during the last decade at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya to strengthen the learning-by-doing approach in several courses. This paper presents the main characteristics of Jutge.org and shows its use and impact on a wide range of courses covering basic programming, data structures, algorithms, artificial intelligence, functional programming, and circuit design.

The competence-based education recently launched in Spanish universities presents a set of abilities and skills that are difficult to teach to students in higher and more technologically-oriented grades. In this paper, a teaching intervention that is based on design methodologies is proposed, to upgrade the competitive capacities of computer engineering students. In particular, this intervention targets those aspects relating to working in multidisciplinary teams and to defining requirements based on the user's empathy and knowledge. The main idea inspiring this technique is that the underlying challenge is a communication problem. As Brooks (1995) states in his book "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering," even a project having all of the prerequisites for success (a clear mission, manpower, materials, time and adequate technology) could fail as a Tower of Babel. The proposed technique through mixed methods has been evaluated with students enrolled in different courses, confirming the repeatability and validity of this method from quantitative measurement, from observation of the results, and from ascertaining the value perceived by students and their attitudes.

This paper presents a case study analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of using project-based learning (PBL) combined with collaborative learning (CL) and industry best practices, integrated with information communication technologies, open-source software, and open-source hardware tools, in a specialized microcontroller and embedded systems engineering Master's course. In addition to addressing industry requirements in both contents and methodology, the course develops capabilities and competencies in problem solving, independent learning, teamwork, and technical knowledge. Since PBL methodology alone does not ensure teamwork, it was complemented with CL. Design review meetings (as described in IEC 61160), deliverables, and organizational resources were also introduced to mirror industry demands. This structure integrated course content and student academic achievement in a simulated industrial environment. The course had students build a modular management system for home appliances, implementing control software on the "Arduino" open-source platform, as well as using wireless communications. The results show that teaching, learning, and student assessment processes can be improved by using PBL with CL. In addition, the introduction of industry practices, such us peer review meetings, brings academia closer to a real-world context.

This paper presents the results of two educational experiments carried out to determine whether the process of specifying requirements (catalog-based reuse as opposed to conventional specification) has an impact on effectiveness and productivity in co-located and distributed software development environments. The participants in the experiments were 76 students enrolled in three courses on project management for software development at the University of Murcia, Spain, and the Mohammed V University of Rabat, Morocco. The results of a fixed effects meta-analysis (Hedges' g) obtained a medium effect (-0.495, p=0.034) for productivity, and a large effect (-1.077, p<0.001) for effectiveness, in favor of using a catalog-based reuse process rather than a conventional specification process. The other co-factor examined, distribution (either global or co-located), had no statistically significant interaction with the process used (catalog-based reuse or conventional specification) for either effectiveness or productivity. Further research is required to study the effectiveness and productivity of the catalog-based requirements engineering learning method so that it can be taught in software engineering courses and applied in real software engineering projects.

The introduction of computer programming in K-12 has become mainstream in the last years, as countries around the world are making coding part of their curriculum. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies that investigate how learning to program at an early age affects other school subjects. In this regard, this paper compares three quasi-experimental research designs conducted in three different schools (n = 129 students from 2nd and 6th grade), in order to assess the impact of introducing programming with Scratch at different stages and in several subjects. While both 6th grade experimental groups working with coding activities showed a statistically significant improvement in terms of academic performance, this was not the case in the 2nd grade classroom. Notable disparity was also found regarding the subject in which the programming activities were included, as in social studies the effect size was double that in mathematics.

Debates have been used to develop critical thinking within teaching environments. Many learning activities are configured as working groups, which use debates to make decisions. Nevertheless, in a classroom debate, only a few students can participate; large work groups are similarly limited. Whilst the use of web tools would appear to offer a convenient solution, none of those currently available provides an automated system for organizing contributions into a logical structure, or for making decisions. To address this problem, this paper describes a new tool for managing and structuring debates over the Internet, and presents the results of a series of trials in an educational context. The tool enables users to post opinions and proposals, and to make multiple group decisions. The main advantages are that it does not require a moderator, and all contributions are automatically arranged into an intuitive structure. Thus, it enabled large groups to carry out bigger projects. Empirical results showed that it also encouraged the involvement of all the students in debates and allowed the participation of each student to be evaluated. The tool demonstrated its advantages over traditional oral debates and, as far as we are aware, it incorporates features not found in any other comparable web tool.

This paper describes two datasets extracted from a video-based educational experience using a social and collaborative platform. The length of the trial was 3 months. It involved 111 students from two different courses. Twenty-nine came from Computer Engineering (CE) course and 82 from Media and Communication (M&C) course. They were organised into nine interdisciplinary groups. Each group included three or four CE students and eight or nine?M&C students. An additional group filmed the making of. This group has only M&C students. Four teachers supervised the trial. The total number of meaningful events was 2984.

Limitations of formal learning (e.g., one-way communication, rigid methodology, results-oriented approach) can significantly influence the motivation and expectation of students, thus resulting in an academic progress reduction. In order to make learning processes more playful and motivating, this paper presents a new educational experience developed by two groups of Computer Science students at the University of Huelva (Spain). As a result, an authentic real experience was incorporated into the classical teaching of Artificial Intelligence courses where classroom sessions were changed during some days for an international online competition. A comprehensive study considering the competition ranking, the students' opinion and their academic progress was analysed to assess the followed methodology. We found out that the educational experience improved the students' motivation, thereby enhancing their academic performance and personal skills as a result of learning through play. Moreover, additional teaching goals (e.g., learning new programming languages or increasing exam attendance) were obtained because of the positive motivation experienced by the competition. As a conclusion, this paradigm of real-life experience--not otherwise provided by traditional practical lessons--allowed us to ascertain that the process is more important than the outcome, which could be adapted to different teaching scenarios within an institution.

This paper surveys how the computer input/output (I/O) subsystem is taught in introductory undergraduate courses. It is important to study the educational process of the computer I/O subsystem because, in the curricula recommendations, it is considered a core topic in the area of knowledge of computer architecture and organization (CAO). It is also a basic knowledge to be acquired in order to work in areas such as human-computer interaction (HCI) or embedded systems. Examination questions, course syllabi, and textbooks were analyzed to identify which teaching approaches are being used. Individuals teaching the I/O subsystem could choose between the options explained here, according to their intended learning outcomes. In addition, a literature survey was conducted on the development and use of tools to improve student understanding of I/O and to make the topic less abstract and more attractive. A goal is to indicate to computing education researchers that the majority of the literature reports experiences in developing or using different resources or educational methodologies, but that these are not based on a theory of learning.

Software testing is the most used technique for quality assurance in industry. However, in computer science education software testing is still treated as a second-class citizen and students are unable to test their software well enough. One reason for this is that teaching the subject of software testing is difficult as it is a complex intellectual activity for which students need to allocate multiple cognitive resources at the same time. A myriad of primary and secondary studies have tried to solve this problem in education, however still with very limited results. Before we can design interventions to improve our pedagogical approaches, we need to gain more in-depth understanding and recognition of sensemaking as it is happening when students design test cases. An initial exploratory study identified four different sensemaking approaches used by students while creating test models. In this paper we present a follow-up study with 50 students from a large university in Spain. The used methodology was based on the previous study with the improvements that originated from its evaluation. We asked the participants to create a test model based on a description of a test problem using a specialized web-based tool for modeling test cases. We measured how well these models fit the test problem, the sensemaking process that students went through when creating the models, and the students' perception of the modeling task. The participants received no compensation for their efforts, and we scheduled the experiment during a regular class. Apart from the created models and their metadata, we also collected recordings of the students' computer screens made during the experiment and used a questionnaire to study their perspectives on the assignment. All the collected textual, graphical, and video data was analyzed using an iterative inductive analysis process to allow new information about the different sensemaking approaches to emerge. We gained better insights into the sensemaking processes of students while modeling test cases for a problem. The results enabled us to refine our previous findings, and we identified new sensemaking approaches. Based on these results, we can further investigate ways to influence the sensemaking process in education, the possible misconceptions that have a negative influence on it, and the desired mental model we want our students to have to design test cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the evaluation method applied to a specific capstone course, called "Ubiquitous computing", taught in different Computer Science Degrees of the University of Alcala (Spain). Along the previous editions of the course several issues have been discovered, which are intended to be solved with the proposed method that was used as evaluation system of the subject in year 2016-2017. The issues are related to the number of students of each degree that compose the group each year, the contents' deviation, the low marks obtained in previous years, the methodological mismatch in relation with other subjects and the bad alignment of the evaluation method used before. With the idea of obtaining better marks, a closer experience to the real situation in software companies and higher satisfaction level of the students, the learning experience proposed implies teamwork, a project-based learning perspective and a balanced use of the technologies. Taking the results obtained through its implantation along the last academic year, it can be concluded that the evaluation method shown in this document enhances the learning process and the contents are closer to the course initial conception, and students got more involved and obtained better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational thinking (CT) is being located at the focus of educational innovation, as a set of problem-solving skills that must be acquired by the new generations of students to thrive in a digital world full of objects driven by software. However, there is still no consensus on a CT definition or how to measure it. In response, we attempt to address both issues from a psychometric approach. On the one hand, a Computational Thinking Test (CTt) is administered on a sample of 1,251 Spanish students from 5th to 10th grade, so its descriptive statistics and reliability are reported in this paper. On the second hand, the criterion validity of the CTt is studied with respect to other standardized psychological tests: the Primary Mental Abilities (PMA) battery, and the RP30 problem-solving test. Thus, it is intended to provide a new instrument for CT measurement and additionally give evidence of the nature of CT through its associations with key related psychological constructs. Results show statistically significant correlations at least moderately intense between CT and: spatial ability ( r = 0.44), reasoning ability ( r = 0.44), and problem-solving ability ( r = 0.67). These results are consistent with recent theoretical proposals linking CT to some components of the Cattel-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model of intelligence, and corroborate the conceptualization of CT as a problem-solving ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]