Information technology (IT) professionals face markedly different kinds of challenges in developing countries from the ones in developed countries. Based on the research literature and our fourteen years of fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, we have identified eight groups of technical characteristics of IT work that significantly affect the work of…

Course descriptions prepared by the lecturers in the beginning of the academic year do not get any feed back from the students enrolled it. These syllabuses are not only used for the future semesters, but also used by the other lecturers without even making any changes. This causes a negative effect on the student education since many of the…

Students often find that learning to program is hard. Introductory programming courses have high drop-out rates and students do not learn to program well. This paper presents experiences from three educational institutions where introductory programming courses were improved by adopting Python as the first programming language and roles of…

Most systems development projects incorporate some sort of life cycle approach in their development. Whether the development methodology involves a traditional life cycle, prototyping, rapid application development, or some other approach, the first step usually involves a system investigation, which includes problem identification, feasibility…

This study examined undergraduate information technology (IT) students' (N = 122) level of ethical reasoning and decision making at a Midwestern university. The purpose was to determine whether IT students' level of ethical reasoning provided information about the degree of their ethical decision making. The Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2) was used…

Case method teaching is not limited to larger, complex cases. It is often useful to supplement classroom discussions with short cases, ones that have been targeted for one or two discussion points that challenge student thinking beyond the usual lecture or textbook. These shorter cases are called "minicases." The objective of a minicase is to…

Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has dipped all over the country, and among women it has almost vanished, dropping 70 percent between 2000 and 2005. Observers cite different reasons for the drop, including the dot-com bust a few years ago is one, but universities are beginning to agree on one cause that is within their…

The aim of research is to compare difference between tenth class students and determine their level of success about classic and web based educational applications of Turbo Pascal lesson. This research was applied to 10 A and 10 TLB students of Izmir Karsikaya Anatolian Technical and industrial high school computer department in second term of…

This paper reviews the literature related to the learning and teaching of debugging computer programs. Debugging is an important skill that continues to be both difficult for novice programmers to learn and challenging for computer science educators to teach. These challenges persist despite a wealth of important research on the subject dating…

In order to better understand predictors of success and, when possible, improve the design of the first year computer science courses at university to increase the likelihood of success, we study a number of factors that may potentially indicate students' computer science aptitude. Based on findings in general education, we have studied the…

When visualization tools utilized in computer programming education have been evaluated empirically, the results have remained controversial. To address this problem, we have developed a model of short-term effects of program animation, and used it in a series of experiments. In the current experiment, we varied visual representation of an…

This article is a review of the pedagogical experience obtained with systems for algorithmic animation. Algorithms consist of a sequence of operations whose effect on data structures can be visualized using a computer. Students learn algorithms by stepping the animation through the different individual operations, possibly reversing their effect.…

This study presents the results of a multi-year mixed-methods study of students' performance (n = 94) and experiences (n = 28) with electromagnetics in an elective Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology RF communications course. Data sources used in this study include academic transcripts, course exams, interviews, a learning styles…

This paper offers a tutoring model its objective is to develop and establish the pedagogical-disciplinary knowledge of prospective computer science teachers with respect to guiding learners in problem-solving processes. The paper presents the tutoring model and the research that accompanied its implementation. The research findings indicate that…

In this article, the community of inquiry cognitive presence model was mapped to a recently developed semistructured approach to online discourse called SQUAD to detect aspects of critical or higher-order thinking online by cleaning online message transcript through the use of code-recode. It is argued that using code-recode in the way suggested…