This article presents the use of a model-centric approach to facilitate software development projects conforming to the three-tier architecture in undergraduate software engineering courses. Many instructors intend that such projects create software applications for use by real-world customers. While it is important that the first version of these…

As software becomes more ubiquitous and complex, the cost of software bugs continues to grow at a staggering rate. To remedy this situation, there needs to be major improvement in the knowledge and application of software validation techniques. Although there are several software validation techniques, software testing continues to be one of the…

In the United States, the number of students entering into and completing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas has declined significantly over the past decade. Although modest increases have been shown in enrollments in computer-related majors in the past 4 years, the prediction is that even in 3 to 4 years…

Students often face difficulties while learning object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts. Many papers have presented various assessment methods for diagnosing learning problems to improve the teaching of programming in computer science (CS) higher education. The research presented in this article illustrates that although max-min composition is…

In this article, we discuss the possible connection between the programming language and the paradigm behind it, and programmers' tendency to adopt an external or internal perspective of the system they develop. Based on a qualitative analysis, we found that when working with the visual, interobject language of live sequence charts (LSC),…

Critical thinking, problem solving, the use of tools, and the ability to consume and analyze information are important skills for the 21st century workforce. This article presents a qualitative case study that follows five undergraduate biology majors in a computer science course (CS0). This CS0 course teaches programming within a data-driven…

We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services and the standard Hadoop API. Using the standard API, students directly experienced the quality of industrial big-data tools. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware,…

With the advances in computing power, high-performance computing (HPC) platforms have had an impact on not only scientific research in advanced organizations but also computer science curriculum in the educational community. For example, multicore programming and parallel systems are highly desired courses in the computer science major. However,…

We present "Xipx," the first port of a major educational operating system to a processor in the emerging class of many-core architectures. Through extensions to the proven Embedded Xinu operating system, Xipx gives students hands-on experience with system programming in a distributed message-passing environment. We expose the software primitives…

We present an undergraduate course on concurrent programming where formal models are used in different stages of the learning process. The main practical difference with other approaches lies in the fact that the ability to develop correct concurrent software relies on a systematic transformation of formal models of inter-process interaction (so…

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. For this article, we conducted four empirical studies on programming…

Lecturing is known to be a controversial form of teaching. With massed classrooms, in particular, it tends to constrain the active participation of students. One of the remedies applied to programming education is to use technology that can vitalize interaction in the classroom, while another is to base teaching increasingly on programming…

Given the increasing importance of soft skills in the computing profession, there is good reason to provide students withmore opportunities to learn and practice those skills in undergraduate computing courses. Toward that end, we have developed an active learning approach for computing education called the "Pedagogical Code Review"…

This article investigates the effectiveness of a course employing a discipline-based computing approach. The research questions driving this study were: (1) Can experiences with discipline-based computing promote students' acquisition and application of foundational computing concepts and procedures? (2) How do students perceive and…

This article presents the design and development of i*CATch, a construction kit for physical and wearable computing that was designed to be scalable, plug-and-play, and to provide support for iterative and exploratory learning. It consists of a standardized construction interface that can be adapted for a wide range of soft textiles or electronic…