Search

Background and Context: Encouraging undergraduate programming students to think more about their software development processes is challenging. Most programming courses focus on coding skill development and mastering programming language features; subsequently software development processes (e.g. planning, code commenting, and error debugging) are undervalued. Moreover, many of these processes involve tacit thinking that is often seemingly invisible, meaning it can be difficult for teachers to identify and address shortcomings in student processes. Objective: In this paper, we employ a novel approach called Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) to encourage students to think more about their software development processes. Method: We conducted IPR sessions with five undergraduate programming students--we screen captured them working on programming assignments, and then used the screen captures to stimulate reflection. IPR is hallmarked by several key features, namely its developmental (rather than evaluative) focus, and the use of a facilitator to guide reflection in a structured way. Findings: We found IPR was useful for both the teaching staff and the students, revealing incongruence between the value students placed on certain development processes and what they actually do in practice. Implications: IPR is a novel approach for shining a light on student software development processes. We hope this paper encourages other practitioners to consider adding IPR to their toolbox of approaches for encouraging students to reflect on their software development processes.

This theoretical paper explores the need for enhanced, intersectional computing identity theory for the purpose of developing a diverse group of computer scientists for the future. Greater theoretical understanding of the identity formation process specifically for computing is needed in order to understand how students come to understand themselves as computer scientists. To ensure that the next generation of computer scientists is diverse, this paper presents a case for examining identity development intersectionally, understanding the ways in which women and underrepresented students may have difficulty identifying as computer scientists and be systematically oppressed in their pursuit of computer science careers. Through a review of the available scholarship, this paper suggests that creating greater theoretical understanding of the computing identity development process will inform the way in which educational stakeholders consider computer science practices and policies.

This article explores the suitability of static analysis techniques based on the abstract syntax tree (AST) for the automated assessment of early/mid degree level programming. Focus is on fairness, timeliness and consistency of grades and feedback. Following investigation into manual marking practises, including a survey of markers, the assessment of 97 student Java programming submissions is automated using static analysis rules. Initially, no correlation between human provided marks and rule violations is found. This paper investigates why, and considers several improvements to the approaches used for applying static analysis rules. New methods for application are explored and the resulting technique is applied to a second exercise with 95 submissions. The results show a stronger positive correlation with manual assessment, whilst retaining advantages in terms of time cost, pedagogic advantages and instant feedback. This study provides insight into the differences between human assessment and static analysis approaches and highlights several potential pitfalls of simplistic implementations. Finally, this paper concludes that static analysis approaches are appropriate for automated assessment; however, these approaches should be used with care.

Background and Context: Subgoal labeled worked examples have been extensively researched, but the research has been reported piecemeal. This paper aggregates data from three studies, including data previously unreported, to holistically examine the effect of subgoal labeled worked examples across three student populations and across different instructional designs. Objective: By aggregating the data, we provide more statistical power for somewhat surprising yet replicable results. We discuss which results generalize across populations, focusing on a stable effect size for subgoal labels in programming instruction. Method: We use descriptive and inferential statistics to examine the data collected from different student populations and different classroom instructional designs. We concentrate on the effect size across samples of the intervention for generalization. Findings: Students using two variations of subgoal labeled instructional materials perform better than the others: the group that was given the subgoal labels with farther transfer between worked examples and practice problems and the group that constructed their own subgoal labels with nearer transfer between worked examples and practice problems.

Background and Context: 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) for all initiatives. Objective: We use translanguaging to examine how programming is and isn't like using human languages. We frame CS as computational literacies. We describe a pedagogical approach for teaching computational literacies. Method: We review theory from applied linguistics, literacy, and computational literacy. We provide a design narrative of our pedagogical approach by describing activities from bilingual middle school classrooms integrating Scratch into academic subjects. Findings: Translanguaging pedagogy can leverage learners' (bilingual and otherwise) full linguistic repertoires as they engage with computational literacies. Implications: Our data helps demonstrate how translanguaging can be mobilized to do CS, which has implications for increasing equitable participation in computer science.

This study is a follow-up to one published in computer science education in 2010 that reported preliminary results showing a positive impact of service learning on student attitudes associated with success and retention in computer science. That paper described how service learning was incorporated into a computer science course in the context of the Students & Technology in Academia, Research, and Service (STARS) Alliance, an NSF-supported broadening participation in computing initiative that aims to diversify the computer science pipeline through innovative pedagogy and inter-institutional partnerships. The current paper describes how the STARS Alliance has expanded to diverse institutions, all using service learning as a vehicle for broadening participation in computing and enhancing attitudes and behaviors associated with student success. Results supported the STARS model of service learning for enhancing computing efficacy and computing commitment and for providing diverse students with many personal and professional development benefits.

This paper outlines a means of improving the employability skills of first-year university students through a closely integrated model of employer engagement within computer science modules. The outlined approach illustrates how employability skills, including communication, teamwork and time management skills, can be contextualised in a manner that directly relates to student learning but can still be linked forward into employment. The paper tests the premise that developing employability skills early within the curriculum will result in improved student engagement and learning within later modules. The paper concludes that embedding employer participation within first-year models can help relate a distant notion of employability into something of more immediate relevance in terms of how students can best approach learning. Further, by enhancing employability skills early within the curriculum, it becomes possible to improve academic attainment within later modules.

The challenge of teaching programming in higher education is complicated by problems associated with large class teaching, a prevalent situation in many developing countries. This paper reports on an investigation into the use of a blended learning approach to teaching and learning of programming in a class of more than 200 students. A course and learning environment was designed by integrating constructivist learning models of Constructive Alignment, Conversational Framework and the Three-Stage Learning Model. Design science research is used for the course redesign and development of the learning environment, and action research is integrated to undertake participatory evaluation of the intervention. The action research involved the Students' Approach to Learning survey, a comparative analysis of students' performance, and qualitative data analysis of data gathered from various sources. The paper makes a theoretical contribution in presenting a design of a blended learning solution for large class teaching of programming grounded in constructivist learning theory and use of free and open source technologies.

This paper examines students' pre-college experience with computers. It finds significant gender differences in how students develop interest in computers; exposure to computers at home; availability of computers in high schools; and high-school preparations for college study in a computing field. The paper has a number of implications to improve the digital divide for women. It is based on 150 in-depth interviews of female and male undergraduate students, members of five major ethnic/racial groups (White, Afro-American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American) from seven institutions in the USA. (Contains 4 tables.)

Reversing is the notion of thinking or working in reverse. Computer science textbooks and tutors recognize it primarily in the form of recursion. However, recursion is only one form of reversing. Reversing appears in the computer science curriculum in many other forms, at various intellectual levels, in a variety of fundamental courses. As such, it is too important a notion to be left unexplored. In this paper we discuss reversing in the context of two theoretical frameworks--as a fundamental idea in computer science, in the context of Schwill's model of fundamental ideas, and as a powerful problem solving means, in the context of Schoenfeld's cognitive model of problem solving. We recognize seven different forms of reversing, and demonstrate the essential role of each in algorithm or proof design. Our focus in the paper is conceptual, yet we briefly note our initial experimental experience, with student difficulties in both the invocation and utilization of reversing. We then discuss cognitive aspects of the teaching of reversing and offer ways to assimilate its awareness and elaborate its fundamental role in computer science. (Contains 1 note.)

Over the past few years Australian universities have sought to establish generic graduate attributes statements to meet the demands of external stakeholders. Within the area of information and communication technology (ICT), for example, professional organizations and employers want new ICT graduates to be able to talk with clients, create persuasive arguments and present work confidently. To meet such requirements, Australian ICT educators have explored a variety of methods to implement graduate attributes. The selection and content of delivery models, however, vary according to university policies and departmental cultures. In this paper we critically examine the dedicated, infused, and embedded approaches to the delivery of generic graduate attributes. To do this, we first trace the development of graduate attributes. Secondly, we present three diverse approaches by two ICT departments within the same university and discuss factors that lead to sustainable generic graduate attribute programmes. We conclude our paper with issues to consider when adopting implementation models and map out suggestions for further research. (Contains 1 figure and 5 tables.)

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. (Contains 11 tables.)

Advanced approaches to the construction of software systems can present difficulties to learners. This is true for multi-agent systems (MAS) which exhibit concurrency, non-determinacy of structure and composition and sometimes emergent behavior characteristics. Additional barriers exist for learners because mainstream MAS technology is young and design methodologies are still evolving.This paper considers the benefits and difficulties associated with teaching/learning agent technology and recommends an approach used by the authors. The paper examines Agent UML--a set of proposed extensions to UML to facilitate MAS design but suggests that simpler design tools are more appropriate for novice MAS programmers. A small suite of preferred tools are presented. (Contains 6 figures.)

Bad smells affect maintainability and performance of model-to-model transformations. There are studies that define a set of transformation bad smells, and some of them propose techniques to recognize and--according to their complexity--fix them in a (semi)automated way. In academia it is necessary to make students aware of this subject and provide them with guidelines to improve the quality of their transformations. This paper presents the most common bad smells made by master students from Universidad de los Andes, and compares them with those from publicly available repositories of Epsilon transformation language transformations, with the purpose of knowing whether programming style affects the incidence of smells. Three concrete contributions are presented: (i) two new bad smells that enrich the existing catalogs; (ii) a process that includes the automated extraction of transformation metrics and bad smells metrics from the repositories, and a statistical analysis that helps in identifying the relation between such metrics; and (iii) a tool that automatizes the process. From the statistical analysis, we conclude that, students must be encouraged and guided to develop maintainable declarative transformations. At this point, our tool has been proved to be very useful to help improve the quality of students' transformations.

Models are expanding their use for many different purposes in the field of software engineering and, due to their importance, universities have started incorporating modeling courses into their programs. Being a relatively new discipline, teaching modeling concepts brings in new challenges. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we list and describe the main issues we have come across when teaching modeling in a dedicated Software Engineering course. We then present a simple case study that we have developed and successfully used in class, which permits students specify a system and its views, simulate them, check their relations, and perform several kinds of analyses on the overall system specifications. For this, we use a combination of UML and OCL. Finally, we report on the results of a survey we conducted among the students of the last two years to evaluate our proposal, and the lessons we have learned.

In educational research, investigators in one field are often ignorant of similar research in other fields. Physics education in particular has undergone dramatic reforms in recent years, all based on insights gained from conducting educational research. Often, pedagogical methods resulting from research in one field can be revised and transferred to another. This paper demonstrates that many methods used in physics and other science programmes can be adapted to teaching computer science. The author has pursued action research in computer science and implemented ideas from science education, especially from physics education, in teaching computer science classes at a small religious secondary school in the southwestern United States. This paper presents ideas and teaching strategies with the hope of building bridges between computer science education research and other science education research. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

Despite the current growing popularity of the computer science (CS) major, women remain sorely underrepresented in the field, continuing to earn only 18% of bachelor's degrees. Understanding women's low rates of participation in CS is important given that the demand for individuals with CS training has grown sharply in recent years. Attracting and retaining more women to high-paying fields like CS may also help narrow the gender pay gap. Further, it is important that women participate in developing new technology so that technology advances serve the needs of both women and men. This paper explores the background characteristics, career aspirations, and self-perceptions of 1,636 female first-year college students in the United States who intend to major in CS and compares them with 4,402 male CS aspirants as well as with 26,642 women planning to major in other STEM sub-fields. The findings reveal a unique profile of women who pursue the CS major and notes many significant differences between men and women in CS and between women in CS and those in other STEM fields. For instance, women in CS tend to earn lower high school grades than women in other STEM fields, but earn higher SAT verbal scores. They also rate themselves higher than men in CS and women in other STEM fields on measures of their artistic ability, but rate themselves lower on other self-ratings, including academic and leadership ability. Further, women in CS are more likely to be undecided in their career plans than men in CS and women in other STEM fields. Understanding the unique characteristics of women in CS will help inform policies and recruitment programs designed to address the gender gap in computing.

A dilemma within computer science departments is developing sustainable ways to expand capacity within introductory computer science courses while remaining committed to inclusive practices. Training near-peer mentors for peer code review is one solution. This paper describes the preparation of near-peer mentors for their role, with a focus on regular, consistent feedback via peer code review and inclusive pedagogy. Introductory computer science students provided consistently high ratings of the peer mentors' knowledge, approachability, and flexibility, and credited peer mentor meetings for their strengthened self-efficacy and understanding. Peer mentors noted the value of videotaped simulations with reflection, discussions of inclusion, and the cohort's weekly practicum for improving practice. Adaptations of peer mentoring for different types of institutions are discussed. Computer science educators, with hopes of improving the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups, can benefit from expanding their peer support infrastructure and improving the quality of peer mentor preparation.

Programming is an essential skill that many computing students are expected to master. However, programming can be difficult to learn. Successfully interpreting compiler error messages (CEMs) is crucial for correcting errors and progressing toward success in programming. Yet these messages are often difficult to understand and pose a barrier to progress for many novices, with struggling students often exhibiting high frequencies of errors, particularly repeated errors. This paper presents a control/intervention study on the effectiveness of enhancing Java CEMs. Results show that the intervention group experienced reductions in the number of overall errors, errors per student, and several repeated error metrics. These results are important as the effectiveness of CEM enhancement has been recently debated. Further, generalizing these results should be possible at least in part, as the control group is shown to be comparable to those in several studies using Java and other languages.

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory case study into the relationship between student autonomy and motivation in project based learning, using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to frame the investigation. The case study explores how different forms of motivation affect the students' response to challenges and their intention to complete the project. Earlier studies have made little explicit use of theoretical perspectives on student autonomy and motivation, a weakness this study attempts to address. As an exploratory case study seeking to evaluate the suitability of a particular theoretical framework, we chose a small case: three students on a one-term computer games development project. Given the small scale, the approach is necessarily qualitative, drawing on project documentation and one-to-one interviews with the students. Our conclusion is that the concepts of SDT provide a useful framework for analysing students' motivations to undertake project work, and its predictions can offer useful guidance on how to initiate and supervise such projects.

Reduction is one of the key techniques used for problem-solving in computer science. In particular, in the theory of computation and complexity (TCC), mapping and polynomial reductions are used for analysis of decidability and computational complexity of problems, including the core concept of NP-completeness. Reduction is a highly abstract technique that involves revealing close non-trivial connections between problems that often seem to have nothing in common. As a result, proper understanding and application of reduction is a serious challenge for students and a source of numerous misconceptions. The main contribution of this paper is detection of such misconceptions, analysis of their roots, and proposing a way to address them in an undergraduate TCC course. Our observations suggest that the main source of the misconceptions is the false intuitive rule "the bigger is a set/problem, the harder it is to solve." Accordingly, we developed a series of exercises for proactive prevention of these misconceptions.

In this paper, we study the relationship between the use of "crib sheets" or "cheat sheets" and performance on in-class exams. Our extensive survey of the existing literature shows that it is not decisive on the questions of when or whether crib sheets actually help students to either perform better on an exam or better learn the material. We report on our own detailed analysis for a body of crib sheets created for the final exam in a junior-level Data Structures and Algorithms course. We wanted to determine whether there is any feature of the crib sheets that correlates to good exam scores. Exam performance was compared against a number of potential indicators for quality in a crib sheet. We have found that students performed significantly better on questions at the comprehension level of Bloom's taxonomy when their crib sheet contained good information on the topic, while performance on questions at higher levels of the taxonomy did not show correlation to crib sheet contents. We have also seen that students at certain levels of performance on the final exam (specifically, medium-to-high performance) did relatively better on certain questions than other students at that performance level when they had good coverage of that question's topic on their crib sheet.

Motivation and metacognition are strongly intertwined, with learners high in self-efficacy more likely to use a variety of self-regulatory learning strategies, as well as to persist longer on challenging tasks. The aim of the research was to improve the learner's focus on the process and experience of problem-solving while using an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and including motivational and metacognitive feedback based on the learner's past states and experiences. An existing ITS, SQL-Tutor, was used with first-year undergraduates studying a database module. The study used two versions of SQL-Tutor: the Control group used a base version providing domain feedback and the Study group used an extended version that also provided motivational and metacognitive feedback. This paper summarises the pre- and post-process results. Comparisons between groups showed some differing trends both in learning outcomes and behaviour in favour of the Study group.

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.

The need for computing education in the K-12 curriculum has grown globally. The Republic of Korea is not an exception. In response to the need, the Korean Ministry of Education has announced an outline for software-centric computing education in the K-12 system, which aims at enhancing the current computing education with software emphasis. In this paper, we review the outline from a higher education perspective and provide insights into its constructive improvement based on our experience in computer science education in higher education and a study of global initiatives on computing education. We also consider the social environment for computing education in Korea. In the proposed implementation, we first discuss goals for software-centric computing education and identify areas of focus. The identified areas are discussed in terms of topics to be covered and appropriate exposure of knowledge depth in the three levels in the Korean K-12 system. We then discuss necessary preparations for the success of the plan from academic, governmental and social perspectives.

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. (Contains 14 figures.)

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.

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.

This paper investigates the links between the "contributing student pedagogy" and other forms of peer-mediated learning models, e.g. "open-ended group projects" and "communities of practice." We find that a fundamental concern in each of these models is the attribution of "value"; specifically, recognition of the value of learning that is enabled by peer interaction, and the way in which value is created and assessed within a learning community. Value is also central to theories of "intercultural competence." We examine the role that the concept of value plays in the development cycle of intercultural competence and relate it to its function in peer-mediated learning models. We also argue that elements of social learning theory, principally recent work on value creation in communities of practice, are very relevant to the construction and assessment of the type of activities proposed within the contributing student pedagogy. Our theoretical analysis is situated within the context of a globally distributed open-ended group project course unit and our conclusions are illustrated with reference to student practice in this environment. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Contributing student pedagogy (CSP) builds upon social constructivist and community-based learning principles to create engaging and productive learning experiences. What makes CSP different from other, related, learning approaches is that it involves students both learning from and also explicitly valuing the contributions of other students. The creation of such a learning community builds upon established educational psychology that encourages deep learning, reflection and engagement. Our school has recently completed a review and update of its curriculum, incorporating student content-creation and collaboration into the design of key courses across the curriculum. Our experiences, based on several years of experimentation and development, support CSP-based curriculum design to reinforce the value of the student perspective, the clear description of their own transformative pathway to knowledge and the importance of establishing student-to-student networks in which students are active and willing participants. In this paper, we discuss the tools and approaches that we have employed to guide, support and structure student collaboration across a range of courses and year levels. By providing an account of our intentions, our approaches and tools, we hope to provide useful and transferrable knowledge that can be readily used by other academics who are considering this approach. (Contains 6 tables and 5 figures.)

This paper discusses two qualitative research methods, phenomenography and grounded theory. We introduce both methods' data collection and analysis processes and the type or results you may get at the end by using examples from computing education research. We highlight some of the similarities and differences between the aim, data collection and analysis phases and the type of resulting outcomes of these methods. We also discuss the challenges and threats the both methods may pose to the researcher. We conclude that while aimed at tackling different types of research questions, both of these methods provide computing education researchers a useful tool in their research method toolbox. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

This study broadens the objectives of previous work (Boyer, N., Langevin, S., Gaspar, A. (2008). "Self direction and constructivism in programming education." "Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group in IT Education Conference," 16-18 October 2008, Cincinnati, OH) in which we used a survey-based instrument, the Personal Responsibility Orientation Self-Directed Learning Scale--PRO-SDLS (Stockdale, S.L., & Brockett, R.G. (2006). "The continuing development of the PRO-SDLS: An instrument to measure self-direction in learning based on the personal responsibility orientation model". Paper presented at the 20th International Self-Directed Learning Symposium, Cocoa Beach, FL), as a new perspective to measure the impact of innovative approaches in the teaching of computer programming in online courses. The data have been collected during the offering of an undergraduate online asynchronous programming course delivered in 2008 at the University of South Florida Polytechnic. Our primary pedagogical intervention has been the use of peer learning forums which attempt to (1) leverage peer learning dynamics in an online course, (2) help students better structure their work on a weekly basis, and (3) help them learn to engage actively with the material (e.g., exercises, reading assignments). This article studies the impact of peer learning forums on these students through the lens of various instruments. Some, such as the PRO-SDLS, are well established in the self-directed learning literature. Others are introduced in this article to provide a more complete picture of both the students' self-perception of their self-direction and its more observable aspects. We also identified intrinsic characteristics of our student population, which we believe to have a significant impact on these instruments' measures. Finally, we relate these data to student feedback obtained through more open question surveys. These observations, made using diversified instruments, on a small and well-characterized learner population, represent the foundation of our case study. Our findings suggest that, after using the peer learning forums for an entire semester, the self-perception of our over-committed online adult learners' ability for self-directed learning has evolved to realign itself with more observable manifestations of their self-direction. (Contains 11 tables.)

Peer assessment is a powerful educational technique that provides significant benefits to both staff and students. Traditionally, peer assessment has been conducted using pen-and-paper in small classes. More recently, online tools have been developed to enable peer assessment to be applied in large class. In this article, the tools that support peer assessment are reviewed and analysed, revealing the common features and significant differences. Future directions for research on peer assessment tools are suggested. (Contains 3 tables.)

This paper contributes to an understanding of the variation in approaches that information system analysts/designers use to do analysis and design. A qualitative, phenomenographic research method was used. Four categories were constituted from the data: an "ad hoc" strategy with the intention of solving the problem as quickly as possible; a strategy of producing atomistic analysis and design artefacts with the intention of proving analysis/design has taken place; a strategy of adhering to a method with the intention of producing a better solution; and a strategy of adapting and scaling a method with the intent to define the problem accurately while sharing a vision of the project. The contribution to education made by these results is discussed. (Contains 1 table.)

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. (Contains 1 note, 7 tables, and 3 figures.)

The current paper describes an empirical study with the aim of producing insights about how students experience programming and software engineering. The research aims to investigate the students' world, and hence, we have chosen a phenomenographic approach. Our questions focus on the students' experiences of concepts related to a realistic programming task in an extensive software system, particularly the Java Interface. The results show that there is a distinct variation of descriptions spanning from a concrete to-do list to a more advanced description where the interface plays a crucial role in order to produce dynamic and adaptive systems. We interpret the results and suggest how they can be used in teaching to provide an extended and varied understanding of how to work with advanced software. (Contains 4 tables.)

Computer science education should not be based on short-term developments but on content that is observable in multiple domains of computer science, may be taught at every intellectual level, will be relevant in the longer term, and is related to everyday language and/or thinking. Recently, a catalogue of "central concepts" for computer science education such as "algorithm", "computer", and "data" has been empirically determined. This paper now concentrates on "central processes" relevant for computer science education. Experts of computer science rated 44 general-education processes regarding four criteria. By using a cluster analysis approach the following central processes for computer science education have been identified: "problem solving and problem posing", "analyzing", "generalizing", "finding relationships", "classifying", and "investigating". (Contains 1 table, 6 figures, and 2 notes.)

This paper builds on previous research into teachers' conceptions of learning and teaching with an investigation of information technology academics. Using a phenomenographic approach to build a model of IT academics experiences and practice of teaching, we aimed to identify any specific issues that academics in the IT discipline face and to assess the impact of the changing higher education environment on their teaching experiences. While there were few discipline-specific issues we did find that the current higher education environment appears to be negatively affecting the quality of teaching and learning within the IT discipline and indications are that these environmental factors are affecting academics within other disciplines. We concluded that current institutional policies, including teaching and learning quality measures and lack of resources, are compromising the way subjects are delivered. In some cases academics are discouraged from improving their teaching practice. (Contains 2 tables.)

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java programmers. Based on a modified replication of Katz and Anderson's study of novices, we sought to broadly survey the modern landscape of novice debugging abilities. As such, this study reports general quantitative results and fills in the picture with qualitative detail from a relatively small, but varied sample. Comprehensive interviews involving both a programming and a debugging task, followed by a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire, were conducted with 21 CS2 students at seven colleges and universities. While many subjects successfully debugged a representative set of typical CS1 bugs, there was a great deal of variation in their success at the programming and debugging tasks. Most of the students who were good debuggers were good novice programmers, although not all of the good programmers were successful at debugging. Students employed a variety of strategies to find 70% of all bugs and of the bugs they found they were able to fix 97% of them. They had the most difficulty with malformed statements, such as arithmetic errors and incorrect loop conditions. Our results confirm many findings from previous studies (some quite old)--most notably that once students find bugs, they can fix them. However, the results also suggest that some changes have occurred in the student population, particularly an increased use of debugging tools and online resources, as well as the use of pattern matching, which has not previously been reported. (Contains 4 tables, 5 figures, and 1 note.)

Computer science is possibly one of the few remaining disciplines almost entirely dominated by men, especially university staff and in the hi-tech industries. This phenomenon prevails throughout the western world; in Israel it starts in high school, where only 30% of students who choose to take computer science as an elective are women, and continues in university and college, where usually less than 30% of the entire computer science student population is female. In this paper we present data describing women taking the undergraduate computer science program at the Open University of Israel. Covering a period of 10 years, we have examined the enrollment and results of thousands of students on 20 undergraduate computer science courses. An attempt has been made to identify whether there is a specific stage in the undergraduate program which is more difficult for women to pass. The good news is that within the Open University of Israel out of the entire population of computer science students the percentage of female enrolments and the percentage of females graduating is almost the same, and the differences in average final grade between men and women are generally not significant. This study is unique because of the large number of students which served as the study population, covering the entire undergraduate program. (Contains 1 note, 7 tables, and 4 figures.)

In this paper we present the results of a phenomenographic study revealing the conceptions of successful and unsuccessful teaching among information and communication technology, information technology (IT), and computer science academics. We examine ways in which the understandings of IT teachers are similar to or differ from other teachers in domain-specific ways. Our categorizations of successful teaching (feeling successful, good delivery, developing student thinking) correspond to similar findings in the literature. However, our categorizations of unsuccessful teaching are more revealing. Undergraduate IT teachers understand unsuccessful teaching in five ways: teacher lacks skills, teacher lacks organizational support, students do not take responsibility, domain complexity, and students do not demonstrate understanding. These conceptualizations do not directly correspond to the ways in which teachers perceive successful teaching, revealing a gap between idealized notions of teaching and actual teaching in practice. Of specific interest, lack of administrative support in the form of insufficient funding, overloaded lecture hours, and inexperienced teaching assistants emerged as barriers to effective teaching. Equally important, difficulties in dealing with abstraction and complexity specific to IT disciplines have consequences for the way in which IT should be taught. These phenomenographic categories of description are intended to serve as a framework for IT teachers to engage in a process of self-reflection leading to improved teaching practices. We present ways in which the understandings of successful and unsuccessful teaching can aid in this process. (Contains 2 tables.)

Non-determinism is one of the most important, yet abstract, recurring concepts of Computer Science. It plays an important role in Computer Science areas such as formal language theory, computability theory, distributed computing, and operating systems. We conducted a series of studies on the perception of non-determinism. In the current research, we studied and analyzed undergraduate Computer Science students' solutions to assignments in a course on automata and formal languages. Our findings shed some light on students' perceptions of non-determinism, their tendency to use non-determinism, and the characteristics of their non-deterministic solutions. This paper describes the current research and its results, and suggests several teaching applications. (Contains 14 figures and 1 table.)

Less than one half of one percent of all processors manufactured today end up in computers. The rest are embedded in other devices such as automobiles, airplanes, trains, satellites, and nearly every modern electronic device. Developing software for embedded systems requires a greater knowledge of hardware than developing for a typical desktop application. Despite the great demand for people to develop real-time embedded system software, few universities devote class time to giving students the necessary skills. In this paper I describe a course and stimulating environment for introducing students to this important domain. I make arguments for using real devices rather than simulations and for using a computer-controlled model railroad. I describe the computing and railroad hardware, laboratory assignments, and course project used in my course. Finally, I present a summary of the effectiveness of programming language choice based on an analysis of 13 years of data. (Contains 4 figures.)

Students learn better when they both hear and do. In computer architecture courses "doing" can be difficult in small schools without hardware laboratories hosted by computer engineering, electrical engineering, or similar departments. Software solutions exist. Our success with George Mills' Multimedia Logic (MML) is the focus of this paper. MML provides a graphical computer architecture solution with convenient I/O support and the ability to build and emulate a variety of computer designs. It has proven highly motivational to upper division computer science students designing and constructing emulated computers. Student projects resulted in excellent student understanding of the detailed inner workings of computers. Students also developed better teamwork skills and produced useful training aids for the lower division computer organization class. Designs implemented include 8 bit and 16 bit von Neumann and Harvard architectures, from single cycle to 12 cycle instructions. Issues resolved during the learning process include timing, initialization, instruction set architecture, and I/O and assembler design. We discuss pedagogical issues involved in using MML to implement instructor and student computer designs. MML is compared to using a hardware-based Intel 8085 microprocessor basic systems course. (Contains 5 figures.)

Embedded systems are increasingly pervasive, and the creation of reliable controlling software offers unique challenges. Embedded software must interact directly with hardware, it must respond to events in a time-critical fashion, and it typically employs concurrency to meet response time requirements. This paper describes an innovative course that gives students in-depth exposure to the challenges of writing reliable, time-critical, concurrent code. Students design and implement a real-time operating system (RTOS), and they write application code that uses the RTOS they construct. Code development and debugging take place in a simulation environment that offers visibility into the system and strictly repeatable execution while maintaining hardware compatibility. We describe the structure of the class, the custom tools used, and the laboratory sequence that results in a functional RTOS. We discuss the development of the class and its impact on our students. (Contains 3 figures.)

Computer science education research has mostly focused on cognitive approaches to learning. Cognitive approaches to understanding learning do not account for all the phenomena observed in teaching and learning. A number of apparently successful educational approaches, such as peer assessment, apprentice-based learning and action learning, have aspects that are not satisfactorily explained by purely cognitive models. On the other hand, these approaches are stratagems rather than comprehensive theories, in that they do not apply in all cases. Education theories which explore learning beyond the cognitive domain, such as social construction, may provide additional insights into matters such as teaching style, curriculum design and assessment practices. This paper proposes a start towards introducing social construction into computer science education, and proposes new directions for research, curriculum development and educational practice. (Contains 4 figures.)

This paper describes the Reinventing Computer Science Curriculum Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Motivated by rapid and significant changes in the information technology and computing areas, high diversity in student aptitudes, and high dropout rates, the project designed and implemented an integrated instructional/research framework. The framework is based around 10 general design strategies that incorporated administrative, instructional, and research principles. The framework consists of a placement examination, three suites of structured laboratory assignments, multimedia learning objects, and educational evaluation and research designs. The results of implementing the framework in our introductory courses are encouraging and insightful. While validating some of our designs, our research also identified areas for further development and research. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)