The issue of attracting more young people to choose careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has become critical for the United States. Recent studies by businesses, associations, and education have all agreed that the United States' performance in the STEM disciplines have placed the nation in grave risk of…

The K-5 school years are crucial, setting the framework for all subjects as well as critical thinking skills. The single most important component in a classroom is the teacher. However, in a formative timeframe for elementary-school aged children, the number of K-5 teachers that are educated with a Science, Technology, Engineering or Math…

Research could not be found that addressed how technology teachers are integrating technology in their instruction. However, several studies have been conducted in other areas of career and technical education. Abbot and Fouts (2001) found that over half of the teachers they studied did not routinely use technology in teaching and learning. The…

This paper examines how students' experiences of learning to program are affected by feelings of fear, using a phenomenological approach to elicit rich descriptions of personal experiences from the narratives of final year undergraduate students. In the course of reviewing current work concerning learning or teaching programming, certain focal…

Classroom instruction continues to change dramatically with new technology and pedagogy. Faculty aspire to develop innovative programs and creative education while seeking effective teaching strategies that capitalize on emerging technology and invoke student interest and involvement. Research shows that student involvement, hands-on projects, and…

Tumaini University at Iringa, Tanzania, started a new B.Sc. program in IT in 2007. In the course of planning and implementation of the program, we found out that standard ACM/IEEE IT curricula are not adequate for an IT program in a poor, developing country. The standard curricula describe, in detail, the competences that IT specialists in…

Electronic portfolios are a student-centered outcomes-based assessment regime involving learners in the gathering, selection, and organization of artifacts synthesized into a compilation purposed to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and/or achievements supported by reflections that articulate the relevance, credibility, and meaning of the artifacts…

Professionals in the information technology field are bombarded with an incessant stream of innovations in hardware and software as well as practices, methods, and techniques. IT educators are among the first targets in the market and must decide if and when to adopt these innovations in their instruction of students and professional endeavors.…

Creativity, which is concerned with problem solving, is essential if we are to generate new solutions to the massive and complex problems in the unknown future. Our next generation needs an educational platform where they can be taught to possess creativity. Design education is such a way to foster students' creativity. Therefore, it is essential…

There has been a remarkable improvement in access and rate of adoption of technology in higher education. Even so, reports indicate that faculty members are not integrating technology into instruction in ways that make a difference in student learning (Cuban, 2001; McCannon & Crews, 2000). To help faculty make informed decisions on student…

It is common to find final or near final year undergraduate Information Technology students undertaking a substantial development project; a project where the students have the opportunity to be fully involved in the analysis, design, and development of an information technology service or product. This involvement has been catalyzed and prepared…

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a problem solving strategy that uses stochastic search. Since their introduction (Holland, 1975), GAs have proven to be particularly useful for solving problems that are "intractable" using classical methods. The language of genetic algorithms (GAs) is heavily laced with biological metaphors from evolutionary…

Students bring prior knowledge to their learning experiences. This prior knowledge is known to affect how students encode and later retrieve new information learned. Teachers and content developers can use information about students' prior knowledge to create more effective lessons and materials. In many content areas, particularly the sciences,…

Creativity is acknowledged to be important for economic growth and as an everyday life-skill, however several influential reports have suggested that education could do more to harness creative talent. Creative cognition literature suggests the lack of creativity is at least partly the result of "fixation" (difficulty in generating novel ideas due…

Artifacts are probably our most obvious everyday encounter with technology. Therefore, a good understanding of the nature of technical artifacts is a relevant part of technological literacy. In this article we draw from the philosophy of technology to develop a conceptualization of technical artifacts that can be used for educational purposes.…