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Colleges are engaging students in collaborative design courses on diverse projects. More of the courses could be focusing on cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship projects including computer science and information systems students with other disciplinary students. The authors of this paper describe a course that is focusing on collaborative design and cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship on innovation projects by students as members of self-directed teams. The course is involving the students on crowdfunding projects of product prototyping, from which they are learning a marketable repertoire of skills. The findings of this paper will be beneficial to educators in colleges of computer science and information systems considering enriching pedagogical practices to be contemporary with the demands of industry.

This paper reviews the evolution of a senior level, live-client project development capstone class in the Analytics and Information Systems department of an AACSB accredited College of Business. The paper traces changes in methodologies and technologies leading to the current Scrum based approach, using ASP.NET Model-View-Controller, MVC, as the development platform. The paper discusses how Scrum is used in a class that only meets three times a week for 55 minutes each time and how the ASP.NET MVC approach to development fits nicely with the Scrum approach to project management.

Abstract The rapid growth of technology and related fields has led to creation in academia to match the expansion demand for IT professionals. One of the current majors that attract attention in industry is cybersecurity. There is a great need for individuals who are skilled in cybersecurity to protect IT infrastructure. Coaching a security-focused workforce has become the target of government agents, industry, and academic institutions. As research and academic faculties respond to this growing demand, evolving curriculum and methodologies for teaching cybersecurity graduates still need to be formed comprehensively. There have been few researches to define and assess the student outcomes in cybersecurity. This paper presents a step forward by developing Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and the desired assessment method to measure those outcomes. This research contributes to academia and training institution by defining the SLOs and suggests preferable assessment methods in cybersecurity. This initial research is based on a qualitative study of academician evaluation of cybersecurity courses. The paper presents the result of interviews along with discussions of ongoing and future suggestions.

Computer science concepts have an important part in other subjects and thinking computationally is being recognized as an important skill for everyone, which leads to the increasing interest in developing computational thinking (CT) as early as at the comprehensive school level. Therefore, research is needed to have a common understanding of CT skills and develop a model to describe the dimensions of CT. Through a systematic literature review, using the EBSCO Discovery Service and the ACM Digital Library search, this paper presents an overview of the dimensions of CT defined in scientific papers. A model for developing CT skills in three stages is proposed: i) defining the problem, ii) solving the problem, and iii) analyzing the solution. Those three stages consist of ten CT skills: problem formulation, abstraction, problem reformulation, decomposition, data collection and analysis, algorithmic design, parallelization and iteration, automation, generalization, and evaluation.

Langara College, as one of the leading undergraduate institutions in the province of British Columbia (BC), offers the "Applied Science for Engineering" two-year diploma program as well as the "Engineering Transfer" two-semester certificate program. Three project-based courses are offered as part of the two-year diploma program in Applied Science (APSC) and Computer Science (CPSC) departments: "APSC 1010--Engineering and Technology in Society", "CPSC 1090--Engineering Graphics", and "CPSC 1490--Applications of Microcontrollers", with CPSC 1090 and CPSC 1490 also part of the Engineering Transfer curriculum. Although the goals, scopes, objectives, and evaluation criteria of these courses are different, the main component of all three courses is a group-based technical project. Engineering students have access to Langara College's Makerspace for the hands-on component of their project. Makerspaces expand experiential learning opportunities and allows students to gain a skillset outside the traditional classroom. This paper begins with a detailed review of the maker movement and the impact of makerspace in higher education. Different forms of makerspace and the benefits of incorporating them on first-year students' creativity, sense of community, self-confidence, and entrepreneurial skills are discussed. This paper introduces Langara's engineering program and its project-based design courses. Langara's interdisciplinary makerspace, its goals and objectives, equipment, and some sample projects are introduced in this paper in detail. We then explain how the group-project component of APSC 1010, CPSC 1090, and CPSC 1490 are managed and how using makerspace improves students' performance in such projects. In conclusion, the paper describes the evaluation of learning outcomes via an anonymous student survey.

This research discusses the use of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality technology applications in the learning process of relevant content to the Computer Science area. This systematic review aims to identify applications that use technologies to represent virtual environments and support the teaching and learning of Computer Science subjects. A protocol was elaborated and executed, resulting in the final selection of 14 papers from four databases, published from 2010 to 2018. The examined papers presented information that categorized technology applications in terms of tools used. Contents addressed to the identification of applied instructional strategies and techniques, and the recognition of effects on the learning process. As a result, we found virtual environments that show potential to teaching basic content in courses related to Computer Science. In addition, the application of virtual environments in this educational scenario has provided positive effects on the learning process, such as increased interactivity, easier content absorption, increased motivation and interest in the subjects, providing greater understanding and improving efficiency in content transmission.

Academic conferences are places of situated learning dedicated to the exchange of knowledge. Knowledge is exchanged between colleagues who are looking to enhance their future research by taking part in several formal and informal settings (lectures, discussions and social events). We studied the processes of knowledge sharing and the influence of the use of IT at the International Conference of Information Systems (ICIS2007) held in Montreal. We describe the categories of knowledge content shared at the conference. Two forms of knowledge sharing were analyzed: formal, guided, planned knowledge sharing in lectures or discussions, and informal knowledge exchange during social events. Data were collected from 274 participants at the conference. The intensity of knowledge sharing in the formal settings was higher compared to the informal settings and was perceived as contributing to future research and to the creation of social relationships. In contrast, informal knowledge sharing contributed mainly to job enhancement and to the initiation of meetings. The discussion centers on planning and evaluating conferences in terms of seeking, creating and sustaining knowledge sharing. (Contains 5 tables and 5 figures.)

The second CSEDM data challenge aimed at finding innovative methods to use students' programming traces to model their learning. The main challenge of this task is how to decide which past problems are relevant for predicting performance on a future problem. This paper proposes a set of weighting schemes to address this challenge. Specifically, students' behaviors and performance on past problems were weighted in predicting performance on future problems. The weight of a past problem was proportional to its similarity with the future problem. Problem similarity was quantified in terms of source code, problem prompts, and struggling patterns. In addition, we considered another weighting scheme where past problems were weighted by the order in which students attempted them. Prior studies have used problem similarity and order information in learner modeling, but the proposed weighting schemes are more flexible in capturing problem similarity on various problem properties and weighting various behaviors and performance information on past problems. We systematically investigate the utility of the weighting schemes on performance prediction through two analyses. The first analysis found that the weighting schemes based on source code similarity, struggling pattern similarity, and problem order improved the prediction performance, but the weighting scheme based on problem prompts did not. The second analysis found that the weighting scheme allows a simple and interpretable model, such as logistic regression, to have performance comparable to state-of-the-art deep-learning models. We discussed the implications of the weighting schemes for learner modeling and suggested directions for further improvement.

Analysis of programming process data has become popular in computing education research and educational data mining in the last decade. This type of data is quantitative, often of high temporal resolution, and it can be collected non-intrusively while the student is in a natural setting. Many levels of granularity can be obtained, such as submission, compilation, edit, and keystroke events, with keystroke-level logs being the most fine-grained of commonly used dataset types. However, the lack of open datasets, especially at the keystroke level, is notable. There are several reasons for this failing, with the most prominent being the challenges of deidentification that are peculiar to keystroke log data. In this paper, we present the public release of two fully deidentified keystroke datasets that are the first of their kind in terms of both event and metadata richness. We describe our collection technique and properties of the data along with deidentification techniques that, while not fully relieving researchers of significant effort, at least reduce and streamline manual work in hopes that researchers will release similar datasets in the future.

Gamification in education presents a number of benefits that can theoretically facilitate higher engagement and motivation among students when learning complex, technical concepts. As an innovative, high-potential educational tool, many educators and researchers are attempting to implement more effective gamification into undergraduate coursework. Cyber Security Operations (CSO) education is no exception. CSO education traditionally requires comprehension of complex concepts requiring a high level of technical and abstract thinking. By properly applying gamification to complex CSO concepts, engagement in students should see an increase. While an increase is expected, no comprehensive study of CSO gamification applications (GA) has yet been undertaken to fully synthesize the use and outcomes of existing implementations. To better understand and explore gamification in CSO education, a deeper analysis of current gamification applications is needed. This research outlines and conducts a methodical, comprehensive literature review using the Systematic Mapping Study process to identify implemented and evaluated GAs in undergraduate CSO education. This research serves as both a comprehensive repository and synthesis of existing GAs in cybersecurity, and as a starting point for further CSO GA research. With such a review, future studies can be undertaken to better understand CSO GAs. A total of 74 papers were discovered which evaluated GAs undergraduate CSO education, through literature published between 2007 and June 2022. Some publications discussed multiple GAs, resulting in a total of 80 undergraduate CSO GAs listing at https://bit.ly/3S260GS. The study outlines each GA identified and provides a short overview of each GA. It also provides a summary of engagement-level characteristics currently exhibited in existing CSO education GAs and discusses common themes and findings discovered in the course of the study.

The increasing use of the Internet calls upon the need for adequate cyber security awareness to better face the risk and dangers connected with the online environment. This research presents an experiment that revealed the cyber security awareness of children at Czech primary schools. They were tested for their skills to distinguish different online risks. After the pre-testing children received training and with the time delay they filled in very similar questionnaires. The re-testing measured how well the children retained the training and their ability to use the skills in the virtual environment. The results show only a moderate level of cyber security awareness at the initial testing. The one-off training had only an insignificant impact on their online behavior. The research reveals an important finding. One-off training does not affect their responsive online behavior and is not a suitable solution for effectively improving online safety skills. The task is to involve cyber security awareness education in the whole educational process. Based on the literature and conducted research this paper provides a set of recommendations for the designers of the cyber security school curriculum.

This paper describes a pilot study that explores students learning how to program via a multi-disciplinary approach. The study participants were eleven 6th grade students who learned programming fundamentals via music activities in a Scratch 3.0 environment. These activities included the programming of familiar melodies and the development of suitable animations or computer games. For that matter, a study unit termed MelodyCode was developed in the spirit of the STEAM education approach and the spiral learning method and included exploration tasks based on individual learning. Via the programming of familiar melodies, they became acquainted with programming concepts such as functions, variables, repetition and control commands, parallel processes, and more. Competitions that win awards were held from time to time, which prompted students to invest efforts in their projects to reach first place and gain the teacher and classmates' appreciation. The study was conducted in the form of action research. The data analysis yielded references to the effect of MelodyCode on common stereotypes students hold regarding programming (masculine profession, necessitates good mathematics knowledge), cognitive aspects (cognitive load, linking music concrete use to abstract programming concepts), and affective aspects (joyful and relaxing class atmosphere, motivation, curiosity, self-efficacy).

Nowadays, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) have been used as complementary methods to support classroom teaching. SPOCs are courses that apply the usage of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), combining classroom with online education, making them an exciting alternative for contexts such as emergency remote teaching. Although SPOCs have been continuously proposed in the software engineering teaching area, it is crucial to assess their practical applicability via measuring the effectiveness of this resource in the teaching-learning process. In this context, this paper aims to present an experimental evaluation to investigate the applicability of a SPOC in a Verification, Validation, and Software Testing course taught during the period of emergency remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Therefore, we conducted a controlled experiment comparing alternative teaching through the application of a SPOC with teaching carried out via lectures. The comparison between the teaching methods is made by analyzing the students' performance during the solving of practical activities and essay questions on the content covered. In addition, we used questionnaires to analyze students' motivation during the course. Study results indicate an improvement in both motivation and performance of students participating in SPOC, which corroborates its applicability to the software testing teaching area.

The use of the Capture the Flag (CTF)-style competitions has grown popular in a variety of environments as a method to improve or reinforce cybersecurity techniques. However, while these competitions have shown promise in student engagement, enjoyment, and the teaching of essential workforce cybersecurity concepts, many of these CTF challenges have largely focused on cybersecurity as a general topic. Further, most in-school CTF challenges are designed with technical institutes in mind, prepping only experienced or upper-level students in cybersecurity studies for real-world challenges. Our paper aims to focus on the setting of a liberal arts institute, emphasizing secure coding as the focus of CTF-engaged learning for beginner to upper-level undergraduate students. We propose a survey system to evaluate the secure coding mentality of our students before and after taking these challenges, as well as an easily-hosted, low-resource CTF platform that students can access either in or outside of the classroom. We have found this system to be moderately effective at framing and improving the secure coding mentalities of our students.

As we move further into the digital age, the acquisition of digital literacy (DL) and computational thinking (CT) skills is emerging internationally as an essential goal for students in contemporary school curricula. As the world becomes more uncertain and volatile due to impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), international unrest, climate change, global economic instability and unforeseen catastrophes such as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it is necessary to review, revise and refine school education curricula and policies. The issue of what is essential for students to learn, and how they learn it, is of growing importance to international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and is emerging as a significant driver for educational reform across the globe. The growing prominence of CT and DL skills across many industry sectors has prompted recent changes to international assessment frameworks such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This paper will briefly discuss specific examples of alternative approaches to addressing CT in national curricula for the compulsory years of schooling and explain how CT has been adopted as a driver for mathematics curriculum change in Australia.

This study examined the effectiveness of guided data-driven learning (DDL) activities on helping technological university students with a lower-intermediate proficiency level to learn grammar and vocabulary topics for the TOEIC test. The question of whether inductive learners make more progress than deductive learners was also addressed. A total of fifty-one non-English majors in a freshman English class participated in the study. Five computer-based and four paper-based DDL lessons were developed to increase students' awareness of the usage of particular grammar items and the distinction between three sets of synonyms. In order to determine the effects of the treatments, all the participants took pre-tests and immediate posttests. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between pre- and post-tests on grammar and vocabulary. However, inductive learners did not outperform deductive learners. As for students' perception of the treatments, it is noteworthy that they tended to take a neutral to less than positive attitude towards this DDL experience even though such an experience helped them significantly improve. The results suggested the existence of a gap between students' perceived satisfaction and their actual achievement. Pedagogical implications of these findings were discussed to improve the efficacy of DDL in Taiwan's EFL context.

This paper reports on the findings of a Design-Based Research (DBR) study that investigated the transformative learning of six high school computer science teachers after they participated in a professional development (PD) training with a focus on Culturally Responsive Computing (CRC). Findings from the statistical analysis of pre-and post-surveys reveal ways in which teachers' understanding and enactment of CRC in their classrooms led to a reporting of increased student engagement, a deeper understanding of diverse learning needs, and improved access to cultural resources to specifically meet girls' needs. Findings from interviews and focus groups further reveal that after engaging in the PD, teachers qualitatively adapted their classroom strategies in order to uplift the cultural practices and gender identities of historically marginalized students. This study has implications for how teachers' professional development is designed and how they are guided to enact culturally responsive computing in ways that help recruit and retain racial and ethnic minority girls in CS courses.

This paper presents an educational setting that attempts to enhance students' understanding and facilitate students' linking-inferencing skills. The proposed setting is structured in three stages. The first stage intends to explore students' prior knowledge. The second stage aims to help students tackle their difficulties and misconceptions and deepen their understanding of the topics under study. This is attempted through individual student engagement in suitably-designed activities and relative feedback. As recorded in previous research, students' difficulties feedback on the material development. The third stage of the educational setting exploits social interaction to help students reorganize their knowledge of the concepts under study. The web-based application of the proposed educational setting indicated improvement in first-year Computer Science (CS) students' understanding of fundamental Computer Architecture concepts and progress in students' linking-inference skills. These results encourage integration in the instructional process of interventions designed according to the proposed setting in order to support and enhance students' understanding of troublesome concepts and their interrelations.

Nowadays, the rapid development of ICT has brought more flexible forms that push the boundaries of classic teaching methodology. This paper is an analysis of online teaching and learning forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, as compared with traditional education approaches. In this regard, we assessed the performance of students studying in the face-to-face, online and hybrid mode for an engineering degree in Computer Science at the Lublin University of Technology during the years 2019-2022. A total of 1827 final test scores were examined using machine learning models and the Shapley additive explanations method. The results show an average increase in performance on final tests scores for students using online and hybrid modes, but the difference did not exceed 10% of the point maximum. Moreover, the students' work had a much higher impact on the final test scores than did the study system and their profile features.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 necessitated a sudden shift to online learning. Faculty at Saint Michael's College, in Colchester, Vermont (USA), had ten days to re-plan their courses as well as potentially learn new pedagogies, adapt to technology for instruction, and help students adjust to the changes. In addition, faculty needed to prepare for the likelihood of at least some online teaching in Fall 2020. Applying a structured approach to course design for online and hybrid instruction was accomplished for the authors' courses in business administration, computer science, and information systems by reworking a framework derived from the first author's previous research. This paper explains the framework and offers examples of class projects and assignments that were effective in achieving learning outcomes for both the remainder of the online Spring 2020 and the online and hybrid Fall 2020 semester. Successes and challenges from this application and ideas for future research are discussed.

Real-life room-escape games are ludic activities in which participants enter a room in order to get out of it only after solving some riddles. In this paper, we explain a Room Escape teaching experience developed in the Engineering School at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The goal of this activity is to increase student's motivation and to improve their learning on two courses of the second year in the "Computer Engineering degree: Computer Networks and Information and Security". [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.)]

Cybersecurity professionals need hands-on training to prepare for managing the current advanced cyber threats. To practice cybersecurity skills, training participants use numerous software tools in computer-supported interactive learning environments to perform offensive or defensive actions. The interaction involves typing commands, communicating over the network, and engaging with the training environment. The training artifacts (data resulting from this interaction) can be highly beneficial in educational research. For example, in cybersecurity education, they provide insights into the trainees' learning processes and support effective learning interventions. However, this research area is not yet well-understood. Therefore, this paper surveys publications that enhance cybersecurity education by leveraging trainee-generated data from interactive learning environments. We identified and examined 3021 papers, ultimately selecting 35 articles for a detailed review. First, we investigated which data are employed in which areas of cybersecurity training, how, and why. Second, we examined the applications and impact of research in this area, and third, we explored the community of researchers. Our contribution is a systematic literature review of relevant papers and their categorization according to the collected data, analysis methods, and application contexts. These results provide researchers, developers, and educators with an original perspective on this emerging topic. To motivate further research, we identify trends and gaps, propose ideas for future work, and present practical recommendations. Overall, this paper provides in-depth insight into the recently growing research on collecting and analyzing data from hands-on training in security contexts.

The launch of a Computer Science curriculum specification in upper secondary schools in Ireland in 2018 was a landmark and a historic development in Irish education. Addressing the historical policy decisions adopted towards establishing the specification, this paper presents an analysis of developments from the 1970s as revealed in key policies and other documents. Positioning the policy change within the context of influences, context of policy text production and within the context of practices, the paper presents an overview of the Irish Computer Science specification. Alongside the background to the evolution in computer science education over the period, the article takes into account the national and cultural contexts and narrates the journey travelled to arrive at this pivotal position. Developments in a global context are presented in comparison with curricula in other countries and some similarities and differences identified. The article uncovers consequences of the specification for the national curriculum, key skills integration and computer science teacher preparation. The article provides an important analysis of the policy trajectory of computer science in Ireland based on a visibly relevant corpus of documents tracing the different stages of this policy and comparing it to similar experiences implemented in other European countries.

This paper analyzed Scratch projects developed by undergraduate students. The sample consisted of 22 child development students (18 women and four men) in the 2018-2019 academic year. The study adopted an action research design within the scope of a course titled "Teaching Science and Mathematics in Preschool Education." The research was conducted within 14 weeks. In the first four weeks, we provided participants with training on why and how to use Scratch in science and mathematics teaching. In the following ten weeks, participants designed Scratch projects every week based on age groups, topics, and learning outcomes of their choice. Participants evaluated their projects themselves and also received feedback from peers and academics. Each participant designed ten Scratch projects (five for math and five for science). The data consisted of 220 Scratch projects and design logs. The study included a thematic content analysis. In the first weeks, participants knew little about the content of Scratch and used one or two characters and mostly control and look blocks. In the following weeks, they learned more about Scratch and used different blocks.

With the increasing need for the incorporation of computer science (CS) concepts into elementary and secondary education, it is imperative that the teaching workforce is adequately prepared to ensure that instruction in CS is robust, relevant, and aligned with appropriate learning standards, where appropriate. This paper shares results from a recent survey administered to current computer science educators across the K-12 space in the state of New Jersey. Using these results and recent literature, this research distills actionable, assessed needs to guide the provision of professional learning to ensure that educators have the necessary tools and knowledge to ensure robust and equitable implementation of computer science education. Results point towards a need to expand the present understanding of computer science by effectively differentiating CS from technology-based instruction and addressing an overrepresentation of analytical content domains, reaffirm a commitment to equity by acknowledging the persistent gaps in participation of marginalized student groups, and critically examine when and where the use of technology is necessary in delivering CS instruction.

Assessment is a central feature of teaching and learning. It is both complex and challenging in ordinary times, and these aspects are magnified in an online learning environment. Given its central role, it is crucial that its design and purpose is rigorous and robust. This paper presents justification for using interactive oral assessment as an online, innovative, authentic assessment approach that prepares students for professional life, combats plagiarism and promotes academic integrity. It shares findings through four brief case study examples of using interactive oral assessments in computing, education, French literature, and aviation. This study also demonstrates the value of a Community of Practice in developing expertise, confidence, and resources to support the effective application of interactive oral assessment.

Although digital advances have enabled hundreds of universities to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to millions of students worldwide, the high dropout rate on these MOOCs indicates a disjunct between the potential of the offer and the success of its uptake. Many studies point to issues relating to interpersonal connection as a major factor in this disjunct. Interviews with students support the conclusion that lecturers' interpersonal tone is crucial to shortening psychological distance in pre-recorded videos. However, it is unclear how the interpersonal tone preferred by students can be realised discursively. This paper captures discursive instances by modelling an engagement framework and identifying particularly useful strategies through comparison of a high-rated and a low-rated engineering MOOC course delivered on Coursera. Findings show that in the high rated course the lecturer consistently anticipated students' state of mind and in response constructed a discourse that performed several interpersonal functions. On the other hand, in the low-rated course the lecturer mostly anticipated and addressed knowledge gaps and issues of difficulty, but not students' emotional responses, and so deployed far fewer interpersonal strategies in the lecture discourse. These findings shed light on how lecturers can use interpersonal language in pre-recorded lectures to improve student engagement.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Computer Science and STEM-related fields were among the most resistant to online courses. This is because of a perception of the need for more hands-on instruction with labs, clinicals, field studies, etc. Additionally, many STEM students had perceptions based on limited experience of an online STEM course. Therefore, investigating how the pandemic affected students' perceptions over time is very important. This study investigates the evolution of student perceptions after one and a half years relative to synchronous courses, asynchronous courses, overall satisfaction with online courses, and lab and project-based courses. Our analysis is based on two surveys conducted in the Spring 2020 and Spring 2021 terms, i.e., the first and last semesters that the university converted to a fully online mode. We hypothesize why there were significant empirical shifts in some areas and not in others, and make recommendations based on the qualitative student responses relative to best, acceptable, and poor practices. Our main findings include: (1) Students' perceptions of online classes have improved but are far from equivalent for a lot of the students. (2) Lab resources have improved a great deal, but lab experiences have only improved modestly. (3) Although students' preference between synchronous and asynchronous online modalities were evenly divided, it did not significantly affect students' perception of their learning experience. (4) Grading policies have left many students anxious and confused. Recommendations are provided at the end of the paper.

Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique used to produce realistic visuals by physically simulating the behavior of light. Although this technique can be described straightforwardly, fully comprehending it might be challenging. It is typically taught in the classroom using the 2-D formats, such as paper or a blackboard. We propose using immersive environments for incrementing the understanding of ray tracing. We focus on improving the knowledge of the technique in experienced users, particularly Master of Computer Science students minoring in a computer-graphics-related area. We argue that exploring the ray tracing process in an immersive visualization environment can further improve the understanding of ray tracing acquired using conventional means. With that objective, this study starts by presenting RayTracerVR, a virtual reality prototype tool for learning the mechanisms of ray tracing. This tool can be used to visually explore and interact with the different aspects of the technique. It allows users to observe the progression of the rays throughout the sequential stages of the ray tracing process and analyze its corresponding computer pseudocode. The study includes user evaluation where RayTracerVR is employed to assess improvements in ray tracing understanding. The prototype's usability is also assessed. The findings indicate that using the ray tracing immersive learning environment results in a supplemental increase in understanding in users who have previously learned ray tracing using conventional means.

Today computing is intricate in all aspects of our lives, beginning with communications and education to banking, information security, health, shopping, and social media. Development of the computing is proportional to the development of software which is becoming a serious part of all daily lives. This paper, therefore, assessed the impact of teaching Computer Programming Language in Tanzanian primary schools. To achieve this, a new tool for teaching and learning a computer programming language was developed. Furthermore, a two-tier approach was adopted where the training started on an algorithm first, then if, loops and case conditionals as the third concept inside the first tier. On the other hand, variables, lists, and functions are hooked on the second tier. Results indicate that students acquired together reasoning learning in a conceptual argument of view and skill performance. Students were able to accomplish the expertise to practice or apply the theories of programming knowledge in programming-connected tasks.

This paper describes the implementation of a STEM scholarship program which utilized a holistic approach to providing a multi-dimensional student support system. The program has been successful in encouraging and supporting women in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science by offering a diverse suite of extracurricular opportunities, actively engaging them in organized events, research projects, and participation in STEM communities, and helping them achieve higher GPAs and shorter times to graduation. The supported women also benefitted from close mentoring relationships with the faculty mentors. The program emphasized the development of empowering settings for women's engagement and achievement, which act to sustain and expand interest in mathematics and computing, and thereby help them to see themselves as future professionals in the field.

Within the field of social reintegration and re-education, this paper presents an educational experience carried out at the Iquitos Penitentiary Center, Lima, Peru, with the aim of providing an introduction to informatics to 25 inmates who volunteered to take part in the project. Twenty students and a teacher from the Scientific University of the South also in Peru, were responsible for initiating the transmission of knowledge from the university to inmates, with the collaboration and participation of the penitentiary coordinator. The main objectives of the case study were to validate both the suitability of the CS unplugged proposal and the adaptability of the L2T2L pedagogic strategy to the transmission of knowledge to adults, specifically penitentiary inmates. This strategy had been originally designed to transmit informatics knowledge from university to primary school. The validity and effectiveness of the experience was assessed using surveys. Results confirm that inmates achieved a good level of understanding when endeavoring to resolve most of the CS unplugged assignments designed for them. It was also seen that L2T2L is adaptable and valid for different scenarios other than those for which it was initially designed. Indeed, it was proven to be valid for transmitting knowledge to the prison population. Finally, it should be pointed out that the experience is easily replicable and that it brings an opportunity to introduce informatics into education programs in prisons, something which can contribute enormously to social reintegration and re-education, facilitating the subsequent reentry of inmates into the community once their period of imprisonment has ended.

Information technology is a significant action to promote education informatization. Currently, there are numerous literature studies on information technology education, but existing research lacks a comparative summary of the research status, research hot spots, and research trend of information technology in China and abroad from an overall perspective. Therefore, this paper selected the information technology education literature collected by China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) from 2000 to 2021 as the research object and used bibliometrics to analyze the literature characteristics, core forces, research hot spot, and frontier trend of information technology education in China and abroad. The results showed that: (1) The discipline literature of information technology education showed a fluctuating growth trend, in which the growth rate of foreign literature was faster, and the scale of Chinese literature was slightly smaller; Both Chinese and foreign literature involved pedagogy, computer, and other disciplines, with the characteristics of multi-disciplinary integration. (2) The United States was the leading country in this field, followed by China, with the total literature accounting for more than 50%, ranking the leading position in the world; China Audio-Visual Education and Computers & Education were representative journals in China and abroad. (3) Foreign research focused on information technology, education, science, attitude, model, perception, experience, self-efficacy, Internet, etc. China's hotspots included information literacy, computational thinking, curriculum standards, application contexts, teaching models, subject integration, etc. Foreign research focused on both theory and practice, while China focused on the theoretical nature of the subject, but the degree of practice was insufficient. (4) Student participation, technology integration, teaching innovation, Internet +, core literacy, and artificial intelligence (AI) have been popular until now, constituting the discipline frontier in information technology education.

Owing to the predominant role of Machine Learning(ML) across domains, it is being introduced at multiple levels of education, including K-12. Researchers have leveraged games, augmented reality and other ways to make learning ML concepts interesting. However, most of the existing games to teach ML concepts either focus on use-cases and applications of ML instead of core concepts or directly introduce ML terminologies, which might be overwhelming to school students. Hence, in this paper, we propose "ML-Quest," a game to incrementally present a conceptual overview of three ML concepts: "Supervised Learning," "Gradient Descent" and "K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) Classification." The game has been evaluated through a controlled experiment, for its usefulness and player experience using the TAM model, with 41 higher-secondary school students. Results show that students in the experimental group perform better in the test than students in the control group, with 5% of students in the experimental group scoring full marks. However, none of the students in the control group could score full marks. The survey results indicate that around 77% of the participants who played the game either agree or strongly agree that ML-Quest has made their learning interactive and is helpful in introducing them to ML concepts.

With the advent of technological advancement in learning, such as context-awareness, ubiquity and personalisation, various innovations in teaching and learning have led to improved learning. This research paper aims to develop a system that supports personalised learning through adaptive content, adaptive learning path and context awareness to meet individual learner's requirements and promote the effectiveness and performance of the learning process. Furthermore, the study used an experimental control group to ascertain the significance of learners' learning styles and preferences in improving learning performance. The model considers different modules such as personalisation, location support, learning plan and context awareness while relying on the proper classification of learners' learning styles. The system was experimented using 127 learners of a Computer Science Course. The result obtained using 10-fold cross-validation on various algorithms shows better performance in ROC, Kappa and Accuracy, which were all used to evaluate the quality of classification outcome and compared with learners' performances in assessments. During classification, Naïve Bayes Model has the highest average ROC value of 0.979, TP Rate of 0.951 and FP Rate of 0.045. The results obtained show an improvement in learning.