Career outcomes are widely used by Universities to market their programs but there is scant evidence that they are attainable by graduates or if they inform curriculum design. This paper reports on a process for designing a University ICT curriculum that is directly informed by the career outcomes relevant to both local and national ICT industry. Outputs from this process are a set of classified attainable graduate career outcomes and a set of graduate skills that are the basis for the further stages of the curriculum development.
Java Programming Laboratory (JPL) is a cloud based learning environment used for teaching object-oriented programming at Griffith University, Australia. JPL incorporates a number of features found in other successful programming learning environments and builds upon them with a range of innovative features. JPL provides a database that tracks individual students’ successes and progression through scaffolded programming exercises and assessment items and gives students immediate feedback on their use of programming language syntax and correctness of problem solutions. A data querying and visualisation facility allows analysis of the database to provide real-time performance indicators from the overall course / problem level down to the individual student / specific problem level. Programming instructors and curriculum designers will find that this facility allows a responsive approach to student engagement, assistance and progression; as well as course problem tuning in a just-in-time manner.
During the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the use of remote laboratories (RL) in engineering education. These laboratories allow students to remotely access and perform measurements on real laboratory equipment via the internet. RLs are becoming common educational tools in mechanical, electrical and computer engineering departments of tertiary institutions. However, the majority of them revolve around experiments that have a static setup and perform batched experiments with no or very little interaction between user and the experiment. Only a few RLs, mainly in robotics, allow users to interactively control the physical movement of mechanical components. This paper will present a development of a RL for teaching microelectronic circuit fabrication which requires precision positioning of measurement probes on a silicon wafer under the microscope.
The choice of programming language, the approach by which students are taught and the software tools made available to students have been controversial issues in many ways. While there once was a consensus of some sort within the computer science education community, it is much more difficult to find common ground among those of us who teach introductory programming courses. The literature is explored and answers sought to the question of which language is optimum in teaching novice programmers, as well as the approach that ought to be used. Finally, the question of whether a consensus can be reached is addressed.
The School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems (CTI) is a technologically-focused college within DePaul University. While DePaul CTI has a large number of technical degree programs, DePaul University is a liberal arts institution and one that is increasingly focused on improving the writing skills of its students. It can be difficult to create courses that cover necessary technical material while requiring writing as a major part of the assessments. In this paper we discuss GAM 224: Introduction to Game Design, a required course in one of the specialized degree programs at DePaul CTI that involves writing in a significant way.
Computing professionals are employed in so many different ways that it is difficult to even define the common foundation that all of them should master; however, a single degree program, computer science, is currently providing the training for most of these jobs. Computing education, following the model of engineering, may need to branch out into specialized degree programs to address the diversity of jobs that computing professionals currently hold. In this paper we describe the approach to computing education taken at DePaul University’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems, an approach that involves both specialized computing degrees and the integration of computing in general education requirements. Both of these efforts have had a positive effect on enrollments at DePaul CTI and hold promise for revitalizing computing education more broadly in the United
The students at present use IT facility at various levels in their educational programs. However, this is only an initial step in exploiting the power of IT to improve the quality of education. The introduction of e-Learning portals in support of distance education has created a tendency to transform the entire education process from class-room style to on-line learning (or e-Learning) style [1]. Before adopting e-Learning portals in the current education it is necessary to know the students standing in the use of IT facility in their current education. We, researchers in SQU, have initiated a series of studies on the vision of student community towards future education. Our experiments used different students' domain to have an overall understanding of the students' vision of on-line learning. We have selected the survey technique as the evaluation tool for this study. This paper presents the results of our survey conducted on the student community of Computer Science department along with a useful discussion and conclusion.
The recent release of the Java version 5.0 Tiger introduces some significant language changes. For educators, some of these changes provide opportunities to improve teaching, while others pose additional problems that require awareness to avoid them. The authors have recently completed the inclusion of support for all new language features into a wellknown educational IDE for Java – BlueJ – and in the course of doing so evaluated each of them for usefulness in education, and developed pedagogic strategies to handle the inherent opportunities and challenges. This has formed the basis of the design of the features in BlueJ which support the language changes. In this paper, we describe the results of our evaluation, provide recommendations on treatment of the new features in introductory courses and discuss how BlueJ may be used to illustrate important aspects.
