AUS-CE

One of the most powerful tools for improving success rates in introductory computing courses is the incorporation of context -- a theme that pervades the computing lectures, assignments, and examples which relates the content to a concrete application ...

At the 2008 International Olympiad in Informatics held in Cairo, the Australian and New Zealand teams had their best ever performances. This talk will give details of the Informatics competition, and how teams are supported in Australia and New Zealand. ...

BRACElet is a multi-institutional computer education research study of novice programmers. The project is open to new members. The purpose of this paper is to: (1) provide potential new members with an overview of BRACElet, and (2) specify the common ...

There are many interesting uses of the virtual world in Second Life for Computing Education. The panel members are involved in tertiary education and use Second Life as their medium, both for teaching and research purposes. However, the session is an ...

This paper explores internal factors influencing student learning of programming. This is based on literature relating to student learning and learning of programming. Two dimensions: motivation and capability are used as a framework to explore the data ...

This paper looks at intervention programmes to improve the representation of female students in computing education and the computer industry. A multiple case study methodology was used to look at major intervention programmes conducted in Australia. ...

This paper describes how programming strategies were explicitly instructed and assessed in an introductory programming course and describes the impact of this curricular change. A description is given of how strategies were explicitly integrated into ...

PeerWise is an online tool that involves students in the process of creating, sharing, answering and discussing multiple choice questions. Previous work has shown that students voluntarily use the large repository of questions developed by their peers ...

Engaging first year students is a difficult problem, as students must develop independent study skills while concurrently mastering their chosen topic. At the same time, they find themselves in an alien environment, removed from their peer group and ...

Novice programmers have difficulty developing an algorithmic solution while simultaneously obeying the syntactic constraints of the target programming language. To see how students fare in algorithmic problem solving when not burdened by syntax, we ...

Marker bias and inconsistency are widely seen as problems in the field of assessment. Various institutions have put in place a practice of second and even third marking to promote fairness. However, we were able to find very little evidence, rather than ...

This paper reports on the findings from focus groups, conducted at Macquarie University, on the attitudes of computing students to lectures. Students felt that two things were vital for a good lecture: (1) that the lecturer goes beyond what is written ...

A national Discipline-Based Initiative (DBI) project for Information and Communications Technology (ICT), funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, has sought the opinions of recent graduates of ICT in the workplace to help inform the ...

International collaborative student projects are inherently difficult for everyone concerned -- the students working on the projects, the faculty guiding the students, and the clients submitting the projects. With more and more schools recommending, or ...

This paper identifies the most commonly cited conferences, journals and books of the 43 papers within the first three ICER proceedings. A large array of conferences, journals, and books were cited. However, only a small set of journals and conferences ...

This paper describes a qualitative, explorative study of how students approach developing and testing concurrent programs. The study is based on interviews with students working on the final programming assignment in a concurrent programming course. We ...

Threshold Concepts deserve discussion and reflection in Computer Science Education; they provide a conceptual framework intended to re-empower tertiary educators. At this stage, the idea of Threshold Concepts raises plenty of questions, promises renewed ...

Learning to program is difficult, a situation that is largely responsible for high attrition rates in Computer Science schools. Novice programmers struggle to grasp an early understanding of programming, which can lead to frustration and eventually ...

The Australasian Computing Education Conference is now in its eleventh year. This paper charts the ups and downs of the conference from its origin in 1996, through its troubled years, to its recent apparently steady state. All 328 papers from the ten ...

While analysing students' marks in some comparable code-reading and code-writing questions on a beginners' programming exam, we observed that the weaker students appeared to be able to write code with markedly more success than they could read it. ...

Students continue to find learning to program difficult. Failure rates from introductory programming units are high, as are attrition rates from IT courses.

Case studies were conducted in 2007 involving Queensland University of Technology (QUT) ...

The concept of the quality attribute scenario was introduced in 2003 to support the development of software architectures. This concept is useful because it provides an operational means to represent the quality requirements of a system. It also ...