The number of students choosing to study computing at university continues to decline this century, with an even sharper decline in female students. This article presents the results of a series of interviews with university students studying computing courses in Australia that uncovered the influence of happenstance and compromise on course…

Braille-reading mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists were asked to examine the usability of the Unified English Braille Code (UEB) for technical materials. They had little knowledge of the code prior to the study. The research included two reading tasks, a short tutorial about UEB, and a focus group. The results indicated that the…

Over the past decade, three rationales have emerged for emphasizing the reinforcement of the United States' science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline. The first rationale pertains to U.S. global competitiveness, the second revolves around the benefits of a diverse workforce, and the third argument points to social justice…

This article reports on a public school that is succeeding in encouraging Latino high school students to select Computer Science (CS) as a major. The students attend a charter high school designed to encourage low-income Latino students to attend college and attain proficiency in English, Spanish, and computers. Using data from surveys and by…

The number of students enrolling in Computer Science in colleges and Universities has declined since its peak in the early 2000s. Some claim contributing factors that intimate that prospective students fear the lack of employment opportunities if they study computing in college. However, the lack of understanding of what Computer Science is and…

Many undergraduate liberal arts institutions offer computer science majors. This article illustrates how quality computer science programs can be realized in a wide variety of liberal arts settings by describing and contrasting the actual programs at five liberal arts colleges: Williams College, Kalamazoo College, the State University of New York…

Using a previously published study of how students differentiate between computing disciplines, this study attempts to validate the original research and add additional hypotheses regarding the type of institution that the student resides. Using the identical survey instrument from the original study, students in smaller colleges and in different…

The recent National Students Survey showed that feedback to students was an ongoing problem in Higher Education. This paper reports on the extension of our past research into the provision of automated feedback for objective testing. In the research presented here, the system has been further developed for marking practical and essay questions and…

This study, the first phase of a multi-phase effort, was undertaken to assess and provide for the information needs of the Faculty of the Schools of Science and Engineering at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in the digital age. The objectives of this phase were to: 1) gain an in-depth understanding of how computer science and engineering faculty…

Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students' learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners…

We studied the problem of constraint-based pattern mining for three different data formats, item-set, sequence and graph, and focused on mining patterns of large sizes. Colossal patterns in each data formats are studied to discover pruning properties that are useful for direct mining of these patterns. For item-set data, we observed robustness of…

My research interest has been in understanding the human communities formed through interpersonal social activities. Participation in online communities on social network sites such as Twitter has been observed to influence people's behavior in diverse ways including financial decision-making and political choices, suggesting the rich potential…

Faculty who offer university-level technical courses through e-Learning environments must surmount several difficult challenges. Traditionally, learning in technical courses takes place through real-time interactions between instructor and students in the course of solving actual problems--a form of activity that is not possible in asynchronous…

Regardless of the course topic, every instructor in a computing field endeavors to engage their students in deep problem-solving and critical thinking. One of the specific learning outcomes throughout our computer science curriculum is the development of independent, capable problem solving--and we believe good pedagogy can bring such about. Our…

For the fortieth time, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Jacksonville, Florida. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes.…