What’s Motivation Got to Do with It? A Survey of Recursion in the Computing Education Literature

One of the most challenging topics for both computing educators and students is recursion. Pedagogical approaches for teaching recursion have appeared in the computing education literature for over 30 years, and the topic has generated a significant body of work. Given its persistence, relatively little attention has been paid to student motivation. This article summarizes results on teaching and learning recursion explored by the computing education community, noting the relative lack of interest in motivation. It concludes by briefly discussing an approach to teaching recursion is appealing for students interested in web development

Preliminary Results with a Targeted Online Java Course

While the College of Computing and Digital Media has offered online courses for 7 years, courses targeted specifically at online students remain in the minority. In this report, we investigate both student learning and student satisfaction with a targeted online introductory Java course developed by the first co-author. Initial results show that this targeted course has equivalent outcomes with respect to student learning and strongly improved student satisfaction

Interactive learning online: Challenges and opportunities

Since the early 1990s online education and online learning systems have held the promise of increasing instructional productivity and reducing costs without sacrificing educational quality. There is no evidence to date that such promise has materialized. The impetus of the newest developments with free online courses to hundreds of thousands of students might drastically transform how we teach more and better with less. The innovation that prompted this panel is called Interactive Learning Online (ILO), and has the distinctive feature of highly interactive, machine-guided instruction that can be scaled to accommodate a large number of students who benefit from targeted and personalized learning. The panelists have experimented with online learning in different ways. Their perspectives will address challenges and opportunities with the adoption of ILO systems

Debating E-commerce: Engaging Students in Current Events

A fundamental task for information technology educators is to help students understand the basic ethical, social, and legal issues inherent in the discipline. We present a method for achieving this goal using in-class debates. Debates allow for a high-level of participation, demand that students conduct significant research, and provide an interactive environment. This encourages the development of communication skills and exposes students to alternative points of view. The debates were conducted in two courses that provide a survey of some aspect of e-commerce technology, one at the undergraduate level and the other at the Masters level

An Initial Report on the Impact of Multiple Technical Degree Programs on Undergraduate Recruitment

In this paper, we describe initial results of a survey taken by freshman and first-year transfer students at DePaul University during the 2009-2010 academic year. While DePaul is unusual in offering a large number of technically-oriented degree programs and this information is prominent in promotional literature, no study of the impact of multiple degree programs on the recruitment of first-year students had been conducted. The results of this initial study show that while a large majority of students indicate that the number of degree programs is a positive factor for application and enrollment at DePaul, more important factors include the reputation of DePaul and the fact that DePaul is a liberal arts institution

Computational Thinking across the Curriculum: A Conceptual Framework

We describe a framework for implementing computational thinking in a broad variety of general education courses. The framework is designed to be used by faculty without formal training in information technology in order to understand and integrate computational thinking into their own general education courses. The framework includes examples of computational thinking in a variety of general education courses, as well as sample in-class activities, assignments, and other assessments for the courses. The examples in the different courses are related and differentiated using categories taken from Peter Denning’s Great Principles of Computing, so that similar types of computational thinking appearing in different contexts are brought together. This aids understanding of the computational thinking found in the courses and provides a template for future work on new course materials

Information technology and computer science programs: How do we relate?

In this panel session, the relationship between computer science programs and information technology programs at universities that house both will be explored. People outside the computing disciplines often find the distinction between these programs confusing. The panelists, who have experience with both types of program, will discuss strategies for differentiating the programs in the eyes of administrators, for advising students into the correct program, and for maintaining focus and excellence in both computer science and information technology programs

A hybrid approach to projects in gaming courses

We describe an approach to projects used in game development courses that supports learning individual skills while also developing team skills. Early assignments focus on developing individual skills in coding and content creation, and when those skills are honed, students form teams to work on a larger and more complex game. Classes that use a hybrid approach, that is individual projects that build toward a large group project, allow students to solidly learn game development skills required of gaming graduates and yet stimulate creativity and challenge students to move beyond their comfort zone

Distance Learning and Student Satisfaction in Java Programming Courses

Student satisfaction with distance learning is impacted by a variety of factors, including interaction with the instructor and the structure of the course. In an earlier article, we determined that student satisfaction as measured by course evaluation scores in an online discrete mathematics course taught by the first author was not statistically significantly different from that of students in traditional versions of the same course. In this article we show that vastly different results are seen when the course evaluations for online and traditional sections of Java I and II programming courses are considered

Graduate student satisfaction with an online discrete mathematics course

Student satisfaction with distance learning is impacted by a variety of factors, including interaction with the instructor and the structure of the course. We describe our experiences teaching discrete mathematics to graduate students using both a traditional classroom setting and two different types of distance learning formats. We then compare student evaluations between the traditional and distance-learning courses to determine if student satisfaction was affected by the course format