It has been proposed that causal power (defined as the probability with which a candidate cause would produce an effect in the absence of any other background causes) can be intuitively computed from cause-effect covariation information. Estimation of power is assumed to require a special type of counterfactual probe question, worded to remove…

Because high school graduates are many colleges' primary target population, information on high school students' performance and sociodemographic characteristics becomes important for the recruitment process. This article introduces an HTML application (referred to here as the High School Profile) that arranges high school information and makes…

The purpose of this study was to examine the factors related to self-efficacy for Java programming among first year engineering students. An instrument assessing Java programming self-efficacy was developed from the computer programming self-efficacy scale of Ramalingam & Wiedenbeck. The instrument was administered at the beginning of the…

Present Educational Modelling Languages are used to formally specify abstract learning scenarios in a machine-interpretable format. Current tooling does not provide teachers/designers with some graphical facilities to help them in reusing existent scenarios. They need human-readable representations. This paper discusses the UML4LD experimental…

This paper provides operational semantics for imperative programming languages that legitimize the phraseology used in the statement and proof of a fundamental theorem of program correctness. Some of the phrases used in the theorem are normally undefined, but intuitively appealing. This paper attempts to give precise meaning to the questionable…

Designing and explaining programs are often difficult tasks, especially when novices are involved. It also concerns more experienced programmers when complex algorithms need to be carefully explained and documented as part of software development.Good practice suggests that code and documentation be tightly coupled; but there are only a few…

The "Computers-for-edu" case is designed to provide students with hands-on exposure to creating Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) reports and dialogue programs, as well as navigating various mySAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) transactions needed by ABAP developers. The case requires students to apply a wide variety…

Program visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical--often animated--and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of…

Individualized exercises are a promising feature in promoting modern e-learning. The focus of this article is on the QuizPACK system, which is able to generate parameterized exercises for the C language and automatically evaluate the correctness of student answers. We introduce QuizPACK and present the results of its comprehensive classroom…

Computational precision is sometimes given short shrift in a first programming course. Treating this topic requires discussing integer and floating-point number representations and inaccuracies that may result from their use. An example of a moderately simple programming problem from elementary statistics was examined. It forced students to…

The author advocates that humanities scholars should seek and study programming languages. He believes that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures--rules, models, algorithms--in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education. Students…

Little research has been conducted on how students work when they are required to plan, build and evaluate artefacts in technology rich learning environments such as those supported by tools including flow charts, "Labview" programming and Lego construction. In this study, activity theory was used as an analytic tool to examine the social…

Recently, a lot of open source e-learning platforms have been offered for free in the Internet. We thus incorporate the intelligent diagnosis and assessment tool into an open software e-learning platform developed for programming language courses, wherein the proposed learning diagnosis assessment tools based on text mining and machine learning…

Three different approaches to teaching introductory programming are reviewed: the incremental approach, the sub-language approach, and the mini-language approach. The paper analyzes all three approaches, providing a brief history of each and describing an example of a programming environment supporting this approach. In the incremental approach,…

Discusses computational tools for learning programming and describes a system that was developed to help university students acquire the capability to model computational problems independently of a specific programming language. User-system interaction is explained; and system architecture is described, including specification acquisition, a…