Contribution: A first-year programming course was redesigned with a large, open-ended robotics project. The course design aligns with best practices for promoting development of students' self-efficacy in solving ill-structured software design problems. Background: From Jonassen's theory, problem-solving outcomes are dependent on the problem…

Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry's model for intellectual development. The results show that students can…

Contribution: This paper employs the automatic scoring of short essays as a novel way to determine pre-service teachers' knowledge of and attitudes toward computational thinking (CT) from their written reflections. Implications about designing CT courses for pre-service teachers are discussed. Background: CT is an essential 21st-century competency…

Global software engineering education (GSEE) is aimed at providing software engineering (SE) students with knowledge, skills, and understanding of working in globally distributed arrangements so they can be prepared for the global SE (GSE) paradigm. It is important to understand the challenges involved in GSEE for improving the quality and…

Any meaningful initiative to improve the teaching and learning in introductory control systems courses needs a clear test of student conceptual understanding to determine the effectiveness of proposed methods and activities. The authors propose a control systems concept inventory. Development of the inventory was collaborative and iterative. The…

A summer academy is held for grade 9-12 high school students at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, every year. The academy, dubbed the Da Vinci Engineering Enrichment Program (DEEP), is a diverse program that aims to attract domestic and international high school students to engineering and sciences (and possibly recruit them). DEEP…

The University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, is home to North America's first undergraduate program in nanotechnology. As part of the Nanotechnology Engineering degree program, a scanning probe microscopy (SPM)-based laboratory has been developed for students in their fourth year. The one-term laboratory course "Nanoprobing and…

If we aim to enhance the interest of students in engineering and therefore produce the best engineers, it is essential to strengthen the pipeline to high school education. This paper discusses several outreach activities undertaken by the Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa (UO), Ottawa, ON, Canada, to help the…

Educational institutions pay careful attention to the design of program curricula, which represent a framework to meet institutional goals and missions. Of course, the success of any institution depends highly on the quality of its program curriculum. The development of such a curriculum and, more importantly, the evaluation of its quality are…