A review into the factors affecting declines in undergraduate Computer Science enrolments and approaches for solving this problem

There has been a noticeable drop in enrolments in Computer Science (CS) courses and interest in CS careers in recent years while demand for CS skills is increasing dramatically. Not only are such skills useful for CS jobs but for all forms of business and to some extent personal lives as Information Technology (IT) is becoming ubiquitous and essential for most aspects of modern life. Therefore it is essential to address this lack of interest and skills to not only fill the demand for CS employees but to provide students with the CS skills they need for modern life especially for improving their employability and skills for further study. This report looks at possible reasons for the lack of interest in CS and different approaches used to enhance CS education and improve the appeal of CS

Individual Code Reviews to Improve Solo Programming

Programming is a difficult subject for many students and therefore a popular topic in computing education research, with extensive research into the teaching and learning of programming (Sheard et al., 2009).Peer code reviews (or code inspections,) have been successfully applied to the teaching of programming (Hundhausen et al., 2009, Trytten, 2005, Wang et al., 2008). Code reviews can also be applied in a individual context as in the Personal Software Process (PSP) (Humphrey, 1997). Making the review process individual eliminates the problems associated with group and pair work as the student is working alone. The aim of this research is to ascertain whether individual code reviews based on checklists (like those used in PSP (Humphrey, 1997) and during formal code inspections in industry (Sommerville, 2007),) with minimal reporting can be used to improve solo programming.The results shown an increase in performance however this is not statistically significant possibly due to the small sample size

Improving the Learning Environment in Beginning Programming Classes: An Experiment in Gender Equity

The under-representation of women in computing is well documented. This imbalance creates numerous problems including challenges of staffing and equity as well as more subtle problems such as a lack of balanced perspective on innovation and social implications. While there is universal agreement that females are equally capable of succeeding in a technical arena, there is a diversity of opinions as causes and solutions to this problem. One particularly interesting theory proposed by DePalma is based on trend differences between computing and other science disciplines. DePalma suggests that the positive trends in other science fields can likewise be achieved in computing if similar science pedagogies are implemented. This paper reports on an empirical study conducted to test some of DePalma’s recommendations. While our investigation is preliminary, it does provide positive support for the theory that techniques that work in other science disciplines may also prove effective in computing. The results of our findings are presented along with a discussion and implications for future work

Can Individual Code Reviews Improve Solo Programming on an Introductory Course?

Peer code reviews have been successfully applied to the teaching of programming and can be applied to solo programming. Collaborative approaches are currently popular and have been successfully applied though social interaction and assessment issues limit their application. It is believed that a checklist based individual code review can provide a framework which allows students to proofread their code prior to submission, improving performance. Pilot and follow-up studies were conducted at Swansea Metropolitan University and although the results are inconclusive some important observations are made with regards to the use of this technique. Further study into the effects of individual code reviews on student performance is recommended

Introducing Accessibility Requirements Through External Stakeholder Utilization in an Undergraduate Requirements Engineering Course

Undergraduate software engineering courses aim to prepare students to deliver software in a variety of domains. The manner in which these courses are conducted varies, though team projects with real or imaginary stakeholders are common. While the key course concepts vary from the entire lifecycle to specific aspects of design, concepts like accessibility are rare. This paper will present a study of team projects in a requirements engineering course. One group of students conducted projects with accessibility requirements while another group of students delivered projects without accessibility requirements. The course content was the same, including discussion of accessibility. To support the understanding of accessibility, stakeholders with disabilities were included in the requirements engineering process. Both teams benefited from the experience as indirect knowledge acquisition occurred. Students from a previous offering of the course, with no external stakeholder interaction, demonstrated lower levels of accessibility understanding

Development and testing of a graphical FORTRAN learning tool for novice programmers

To address the difficulties associated with computer programming, this article first looks at some reasons why students, especially engineering students, find programming such a daunting prospect, and it proposes a programming learning tool managed by a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA). The DFA machine used a graphical environment provided by Simulink to teach the FOR-mula TRANslator (FORTRAN) programming language to science students. The proposed programming learning tool and the traditional method of teaching were compared and evaluated. The results of evaluation indicated that there was an improvement in learning effectiveness of the proposed learning tool

E-Learning Methods as a Driver for the Internationalisation of Web Development Courses

Over the past decade, as software development has moved from a platform specific, desktop based software approach to a web focused environment, the ability to develop courses for wider delivery has increased. At the same time university courses have undergone major changes in teaching mode, with an expectation that online versions of teaching materials should be delivered as readily and to the same quality as in-class materials. This paper examines how the re-development of course materials to support online (off-campus) students as well as on campus students provides an opportunity to deliver those same materials to overseas partners. This is brought about by the need to select programming environments that are readily available to online students, along with detailed learning materials that allow online students to work at the same level of detail as on campus students. The integration of freely available and easily configurable development environments and teaching/assessment items based on those environments provide the opportunity for international teaching partners to support both their staff and students. This support comes from not having to rely on expensive, difficult to configure software systems, and by providing learning materials that are written specifically for those environments, so that both configuration and use of the environments form core elements of the teaching process. Examples of this process from a number of web programming are discussed in the paper, as are the results from both the local and international perspective