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In today's technology-laden society human – computer interaction (HCI) is an important knowledge area for computer scientists and software engineers. This paper surveys existing approaches to incorporate HCI into computer science (CS) and such related issues as the perceived gap between the interests of the HCI community and the needs of CS educators. It presents several implementations of the HCI subset of the CC′01 curricular guidelines, targeting CS educators with varying degrees of HCI expertise. These implementations include course/module outlines from freshman to graduate levels, suggested texts, and project ideas and issues, such as programming languages and environments. Most importantly, each outline incorporates Bloom's taxonomy to identify the depth of knowledge to be mastered by students. This paper condenses collaborative contributions of 26 HCI/CS educators aiming to improve HCI coverage in mainstream CS curricula.

This paper examines the needs of students who, in the past, may have chosen to major in computer science or some other aspect of information technology as a way of achieving the goal of finding a job in the computer graphics field. The growth in computer graphics has lead to increased job opportunities in the industry. However, these jobs require fluency in both art and computing that an individual course or even a sequence of several courses cannot provide. In the past, there has been discussion of curricula for isolated graphics courses as part of a BS/CS degree, but industry demands more preparation than what one or two courses can deliver. This paper surveys and compares the two extant Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Graphics with the intent of encouraging dialog on the possibility of a four-year curriculum supporting this discipline.

Computing has become highly visual as interactive programs become increasingly prevalent. Computer science students need to be able to create effective visual displays as part of interface implementation. This paper describes a course covering graphic design topics relevant to computer science students. In this course, students learn the basic visual elements, the visual organizational principles and how to use them in the context of the digital page. The other topics of this paper are the presentation of course information to the computer science student, the implementation of the course information as praxis, course project construction, and a method for critiquing student projects. Curriculum Integration will also be discussed as a feature towards achieving a seamless and collaborative experience.

Educators make consequential curricular decisions, often with little support, particularly as it relates to equity and how to support all students. This paper investigates the use of a rubric to su...

Through a cross‐disciplinary approach, two researchers solved the problem of poorly written term papers in the computer science curriculum. Using software engineering techniques, students produced focused, well‐organized, well‐formatted papers, some of publishable quality. The three‐step assignment taught time and research management, organization, and accepted formatting style. The researchers developed supplemental materials to help students create and then assess their work. Any Computer Science teacher at any university level can use the material if a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program exists or if the instructor has sufficient rhetorical skills.

To support teachers to implement Computer Science curricula into classrooms from the very first year of school, teachers, schools and organisations seek quality curriculum resources to support implementation and teacher professional development. Until now, many Computer Science resources and outreach initiatives have targeted K-12 school-age children, with the intention to engage children and increase interest, rather than to formally teach concepts and skills. What is the educational quality of existing Computer Science resources and to what extent are they suitable for classroom learning and teaching? In this paper, an assessment framework is presented to evaluate the quality of online Computer Science resources. Further, a semi-systematic review of available online Computer Science resources was conducted to evaluate resources available for classroom learning and teaching and to identify gaps in resource availability, using the Australian curriculum as a case study analysis. The findings reveal a predo...

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

Teaching the fundamentals of robotics to computer science undergraduates requires designing a well-balanced curriculum that is complemented with hands-on applications on a platform that allows rapid construction of complex robots, and implementation of sophisticated algorithms. This paper describes such an elective introductory course where the Lego Mindstorms NXT kits are used as the robot platform. The aims, scope and contents of the course are presented, and the design of the laboratory sessions as well as the term projects, which address several core problems of robotics and artificial intelligence simultaneously, are explained in detail.

Modern robots, like today’s smartphones, are complex devices with intricate software systems. Introductory robot programming courses must evolve to reflect this reality, by teaching students to make use of the sophisticated tools their robots provide rather than reimplementing basic algorithms. This paper focuses on teaching with Tekkotsu, an open source robot application development framework designed specifically for education. But, the curriculum described here can also be taught using ROS, the Robot Operating System that is now widely used for robotics research.

To design an effective computer science curriculum, educators require a systematic method of classifying the difficulty level of learning activities and assessment tasks. This is important for curriculum design and implementation and for communication between educators. Different educators must be able to use the method consistently, so that classified activities and assessments are comparable across the subjects of a degree, and, ideally, comparable across institutions. One widespread approach to supporting this is to write learning objects in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy. This, or other such classifications, is likely to be more effective if educators can use them consistently, in the way experts would use them. To this end, we present the design and evaluation of our online interactive web-based tutorial system, which can be configured and used to offer training in different classification schemes. We report on results from three evaluations. First, 17 computer science educators complete a tutorial on using Bloom's Taxonomy to classify programming examination questions. Second, 20 computer science educators complete a Neo-Piagetian tutorial. Third evaluation was a comparison of inter-rater reliability scores of computer science educators classifying programming questions using Bloom's Taxonomy, before and after taking our tutorial. Based on the results from these evaluations, we discuss the effectiveness of our tutorial system design for teaching computer science educators how to systematically and consistently classify programming examination questions. We also discuss the suitability of Bloom's Taxonomy and Neo-Piagetian theory for achieving this goal. The Bloom's and Neo-Piagetian tutorials are made available as a community resource. The contributions of this paper are the following: the tutorial system for learning classification schemes for the purpose of coding the difficulty of computing learning materials; its evaluation; new insights into the consistency that computing educators can achieve using Bloom; and first insights into the use of Neo-Piagetian theory by a group of classifiers. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

This paper analyses the teaching and learning of computing in a Web-conferencing environment. A discourse analysis of three introductory programming learning episodes is presented to demonstrate issues and effects that arise when teaching computing using such an approach. The subject of discussion, the interactive nature of discussion and any actions performed by both the teacher and students were coded in order to determine how the approach to teaching impacted upon discourse. Student participation increased under student-centred approaches as the responsibility for the direction of curriculum-based discussion was devolved from the teacher to the students. However, teacher-led approaches incurred less of a collaborative overhead relating to coordinating activity between people and operating the technology. The data analysed and the approach adopted represent a subset of outputs from a PhD thesis investigating the teaching and learning of computer programming using Web-conferencing.

An introductory CS1 course presents problems for educators and students due to students' diverse background in programming knowledge and exposure. Students who enroll in CS1 also have different expectations and motivations. Prompted by the curricular guidelines for undergraduate programmes in computer science released in 2001 by the ACM/IEEE, and driven by a departmental project to reinvent the undergraduate computer science and computer engineering curricula at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we are currently implementing a series of changes which will improve our introductory courses. One key component of our project is an online placement examination tied to the cognitive domain that assesses student knowledge and intellectual skills. Our placement test is also integrated into a comprehensive educational research design containing a pre- and posttest framework for assessing student learning and providing valuable feedback for needed instructional revisions. In this paper, we focus on the design and...

The final report of the Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula (CC2001) suggests that an updated computer science curricula must reflect the broadening nature of our discipline. Two areas that are included in the CC2001 are software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI). While the first inclination might be to incorporate HCI concepts into a traditional SE course, we propose a different approach. This paper outlines a project-oriented HCI course in which we are able to emphasize some SE notions in the context of HCI concepts. Our course is also a maturation class for our students because they are exposed to a number of non-programming computer science activities, including project specification, software and interface design, user testing, prototyping and use of guidelines. We include an overview of course content that illustrates our approach. We also describe our coverage of specific CC2001 knowledge units and provide some feedback data for our course.

This paper summarizes the RESOLVE approach for introducing component-based software engineering (CBSE) early in the undergraduate CS curriculum, and an evaluation of its impact at two institutions. Principles taught include a modular style of software development, human understandable, yet formally-specified component behavior, maintainability, as well as ‘classical’ issues such as efficiency analysis and reasoning. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of student outcomes and end-to-end changes in student attitudes show mostly positive results that are statistically significant, confirming that (1) CBSE principles can be taught without displacing essential classical principles, (2) students can understand and reuse components based on mathematical specifications, and (3) student attitudes towards software engineering can be altered in directions heretofore often assumed to be difficult to achieve.

This paper shows how students can quickly learn how to use neural networks as classifiers. It shows how to apply the teaching principles of problem-based learning, the inverted curriculum and action reflection to equip students to undertake a substantial classification project. The approach centers around the use of a single real-life classification problem to drive the teaching. It describes a series of experiments on the Iris data which demonstrate that it is a suitable data set to support this approach.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has convened the yearly Conference on Computer Science Education in the Secondary Schools since 1995 to discuss and carry out a systematic study of issues facing computer science education in the state of New Jersey. The goal is to address the implications of these curricular issues, identify the obstacles to classroom implementation, and to make suggestions for possible solutions. The outcome of these conferences is a clear indication that a seamless articulation between high-school programs and those at university level is of critical importance for secondary school educators and could serve as the foundation for implementing a computer science curriculum in the schools. This paper reviews the current status of secondary schools computer science education in the state of New Jersey and discusses curriculum guidelines formulated by conference participants, themselves classroom teachers. This work, along with previous curriculum re commendations reported in the li...

One of the main problems faced within departments of computer science is how to encourage students to use their algorithmic and programming skills in the real-life context. This paper deals with control technologies for higher education. We define controlware as a toolkit for creating the control part of a mobile robot in interactive learning environments and educational micro-worlds. Intelligent behavior of mobile robots is created through the composition of constituent control units. The overall behavior of a mobile robot is half cooperative and half-competitive realization of the goals of the control units. To construct this composition behavior and resolve the corresponding conflicts, a partially ordering priority arbitration subsystem is defined. It is shown that the suggested approach links educational processes both in a control curriculum and an intelligent robotics curriculum. We hope that the spreadsheet-based controlware will make the mobile robots lear ning environment an accepted educational ...

Summary A network-centric university teaching and research environment based around mobile robots is described. It supports teaching a wide spectrum of computer science and engineering subjects (eg digital electronics, computer architecture, operating systems, communications, distributed processing, software engineering, machine vision, artificial intelligence, embedded computer design, real-time computing, HCI, Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality etc) within a single unified experimental environment. This enables students to combine their coursework so as to build more complex, interesting and industrially relevant systems thereby significantly increasing their motivation and knowledge. The laboratory infrastructure makes extensive use of networks to produce a versatile and cost effectiveness teaching and research environment. This paper will focus on the teaching aspects of the laboratory describing the technical infrastructure showing how it is used to support the Essex University information technology curriculum and report on the effectiveness of the approach. Finally, to demonstrate the more general academic synergy provided by this laboratory a short overview of some of the research applications is presented.

When a liberal arts college decides to include computer science as one of its academic disciplines, a number of questions arise. What is an appropriate curriculum? What sort of laboratory support does this new discipline need? How does a small liberal arts school attract, retain, and evaluate faculty in this area? Do computer science faculty become a separate department or remain joined with mathematics or some other discipline? In short, what must be done to put computer science on equal footing with mathematics and other scientific disciplines? This paper addresses these questions.

This paper discusses the teaching of computer science and engineering in the laboratory. A case is made for the use of laboratory experiences together with the classification of the types of laboratories both in and out of the university environment. Emphasis is placed on the design component. The current problems in establishing, developing, and maintaining laboratory programs are addressed and the response to these from the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM are presented. Typical costs are given to set up the components of a laboratory program for a full curriculum.

Current research stresses that the success or failure of a new system depends on the education and training that users receive. Implicit in these findings is the warning that automation without appropriate education will lead to chaos. This paper reports the development of a plan to educate managers to fully utilize new computer systems and to recognize the potential of automation. The plan is unique in that it is a cooperative endeavor between a major university and a large government agency. The motivation for providing the education is first presented by reviewing current literature that addresses reasons to educate; who should educate, and what education and training should be conducted to ensure success. The curriculum guidelines, developed by the government agency, were specifically stated, and the joint curriculum reconciled these guidelines with normative goals for curriculum development. This was accomplished through close cooperation between the two groups of participants. The article discusses ...