AUS-CE

This work attempts to understand how novices approach runtime analysis tasks, where the number of operations performed by a given program needs to be analyzed by looking at the code. Such tasks are commonly used by instructors in courses on data ...

Debugging code is a complex task that requires knowledge about the mechanics of a programming language, the purpose of a given program, and an understanding of how the program achieves the purpose intended. It is generally accepted that prior ...

This paper presents the development of an initial framework for the classification and analysis of questions in database modelling and design examinations. Guidelines are provided for the classification of these questions using the revised Bloom’s ...

Prior research has reported conflicting results on whether the presence of a contextualized narrative in a problem statement is a help or a hindrance to students when solving problems. On the one hand, results from psychology and mathematics seem to ...

Maintainability is an important quality attribute of code, and so should be a key learning outcome for software engineering programmes. This raises the question of how to assess this learning outcome. In this practical report we describe how we ...

Many visualisation tools have been designed to help students with learning programming concepts, often showing positive impact on student performance. Analogies have also often been used to assist in teaching students various programming concepts, and ...

Bloom’s taxonomy is a well-known and widely used method of classifying assessment tasks. However, the application of Bloom’s taxonomy in computing education is often difficult and the classification often suffers from poor inter-rater reliability. ...

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a popular question format in introductory programming courses as they are a convenient means to provide scalable assessments. However, with typically only four or five answer options and a single correct answer, ...

Lecture recordings are a common and useful resource for students due to the flexibility they provide. Recent rapid shifts to online modes of teaching have made recorded lectures especially valuable as many students rely on them to access course content. ...

Peer code review has been shown to have several benefits for students, including the development of both technical skills and soft skills. However, a lack of motivation has been identified as one of the barriers to successful peer code review in ...

Programming assignments are a common form of assessment in introductory courses and often require substantial work to complete. Students must therefore plan and manage their time carefully, especially leading up to published deadlines. Although time ...

Academic course advice for computing students has changed and presents new challenges. It has become more complex due to an increasing number of specialised study pathways, and less personal as centralised enrolment systems have taken the place of ...

Teachers new to computing who are not familiar with technical “jargon” can feel like they have landed in a foreign world, making them reluctant to take on the subject, and potentially leading to misconceptions and misunderstandings in the classroom. ...

Australia is facing a shortfall in the number of appropriately skilled ICT workers needed for Australia’s future workforce. One avenue to address this issue is for universities and stakeholders to conduct initiatives to attract prospective students to ...

In this paper we present an online IDE (Spinoza 3.0) for teaching Python programming in which the students are (sometimes) required to verbally reflect on their error messages and unit test failures before being allowed to modify their code. This ...

High failure and attrition rates in first-year, college-level computing courses are a big concern for institutions and instructors. For many years, computing instructors have devoted substantial time and energy to increase retention in those courses. ...

Australia is a destination of choice for international students studying IT who in 2019 comprised 62% of IT enrolments in universities [9]. Studying in English is often problematic for students from a Non-English Speaking Background (NESB), leading to ...

One of the goals of computing education research is to understand and document the effectiveness of pedagogical strategies in computing. Among the many methods available to teach programming, two commonly used techniques to present code in Computer ...

The behavior of students during completion of a learning task can give crucial insights into typical misconceptions as well as issues with the task design. However, analysing the detailed trace of every individual student is time-consuming and ...

For decades computing educators have been trying to identify and predict at-risk students, particularly early in the first programming course. These efforts range from the analyzing demographic data that pre-exists undergraduate entrance to using ...

Some novice programming students procrastinate the start of a programming assignment. These students also seem to struggle knowing whether or not their program meets the requirements of the assignment. Both of these factors play a role in a student’s ...

Programming error messages have proven to be notoriously problematic for novices who are learning to program. Although recent efforts have focused on improving message wording, these have been criticized for attempting to improve usability without first ...

Digital learning environments are emerging as a key part of the future of computer science education. However, there is little empirical understanding of what forms of didactic feedback are pedagogically optimal for short- and long-term learning ...