The Speak Up National Research Project annually polls K-12 students, parents and educators about the role of technology for learning in and out of school. For the past twelve years, Project Tomorrow's® annual Speak Up Research Project has provided schools and districts nationwide and throughout the globe with new insights into how today's students…

Scholars representing the field of computer/information science were asked to identify what they considered to be the most exciting and imaginative work currently being done in their field, as well as how that work might change our understanding. The scholars included Ken Birman, Jennifer Rexford, Tim Roughgarden, Margo Seltzer, Jim Spohrer, and…

The "open hardware mobile manipulator" (OHMM) is a new open platform with a unique combination of features for teaching robotics software and algorithms. On-board low- and high-level processors support real-time embedded programming and motor control, as well as higher-level coding with contemporary libraries. Full hardware designs and…

In the last two decades, there was a proliferation of programming exercise formats that hinders interoperability in automatic assessment. In the lack of a widely accepted standard, a pragmatic solution is to convert content among the existing formats. BabeLO is a programming exercise converter providing services to a network of heterogeneous…

Computers have become a part of every area of human life, and are often used in the field of education. Becoming self-confident with regard to computer use can therefore make individuals' lives particularly the lives of university students substantially easier. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the computer self-efficacy belief (CSEB) level…

Uncertainty about future career prospects has increased enormously for students enrolled in higher education Information Technology (IT) programs. However, many computer science programmes pay little attention to career counselling. This article reports the results of a pilot study intended to develop group counselling for IT students to promote…

This article describes a new and innovative open co-op program for MIS/IS students. The program, Global Enterprise Technology Immersion Experience (GET IE), has a global enterprise focus that is integrated with hands-on experiential work-based learning to provide a context in which students are stimulated to utilize their classroom knowledge. The…

Learning the syntax, semantics, and concepts behind software engineering can be a challenging task for many individuals. This paper examines the Alice 3 software, a three-dimensional visual environment for teaching programming concepts, to determine if it is an effective tool for improving student achievement, raising self-efficacy, and engaging…

This dissertation presents the design, development and short-term evaluation of an embodied conversational agent designed to mentor human users. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) was created and programmed to mentor African American computer science majors on their decision to pursue graduate study in computing. Before constructing the ECA,…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

Language modeling is one of many problems in language processing that have to grapple with naturally high ambient dimensions. Even in large datasets, the number of unseen sequences is overwhelmingly larger than the number of observed ones, posing clear challenges for estimation. Although existing methods for building smooth language models tend to…

The significance of computer science for economics and society is undisputed. In particular, computer science is acknowledged to play a key role in schools (e.g., by opening multiple career paths). The provision of effective computer science education in schools is dependent on teachers who are able to properly represent the discipline and whose…

This research investigated the impact learning a visual programming language, Visual Basic, has on hemispheric cognitive style, as measured by the Hemispheric Mode Indicator (HMI). The question to be answered is: will a computer programming course help students improve their cognitive abilities in order to perform well? The cognitive styles for…

This study examined the academic preparation and job skill needs of information systems program graduates from institutions in an Eastern state, from their perspective. A historical review of the literature surrounding IS skill requirements was conducted for this study to provide the changes in IS over the past several decades. Providing a…

Assessment is a delicate task in the overall teaching process because it may require significant time and may be prone to subjectivity. Subjectivity is especially true for disciplines in which perceptual factors play a key role in the evaluation. In previous decades, computer-based assessment techniques were developed to address the…