Nowadays, few professionals understand the techniques and testing criteria to systematize the software testing activity in the software industry. Towards shedding some light on such problems and promoting software testing, professors in the area have established Massive Open Online Courses as educational initiatives. However, the main limitation…

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…

The contents taught in the programming subjects have a great relevance in the formation of computing students. However, these subjects are characterized by high failure rates, as they require logical reasoning and mathematical knowledge. Thus, establishing knowledge through the subject of algorithms can help students to overcome these difficulties…

This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation.…

The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor's viewpoint. This research aims to…

Teaching introductory computer programming and choosing the proper tools and programming languages are challenging tasks. Most of the existing tools are not fully integrated into systems to support the teaching-learning processes. The present paper describes the usability evaluation of the Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle (VPL-Moodle)…

Learning Object (LO) is one of the main research topics in the e-learning community in the recent years. In this context, granularity is a key factor for LO reuse. This paper presents a methodology to define the learning objects granularity in the computing area as well as a case study in software testing. We carried out five experiments to…

The teaching-learning methodology adopted in the Introduction to Computer Science classes may be a process that makes it difficult to understand the principles of programming language for undergraduate students in Computer Science and related areas, generating high failure and course drop out rates. This paper presents an analysis of the results…

The teaching of sorting algorithms is an essential topic in undergraduate computing courses. Typically the courses are taught through traditional lectures and exercises involving the implementation of the algorithms. As an alternative, this article presents the design and evaluation of three educational games for teaching Quicksort and Heapsort.…

Teaching web development in Computer Science undergraduate courses is a difficult task. Often, there is a gap between the students' experiences and the reality in the industry. As a consequence, the students are not always well-prepared once they get the degree. This gap is due to several reasons, such as the complexity of the assignments, the…

Contests are usually applied in the academic environment to simulate real professional situations that require from the participants a more pro-active attitude than the one shown in conventional coursework. Although they are commonly applied in the scope of a unique course, the contest described here was an extracurricular experience applied in an…