Anomaly Detection for Early Warning in Object-oriented Programming Course

Understanding the development of professional identity in Computer Science (CS) undergraduate students can help better evaluate CS degree program's effectiveness in preparing students for their career goals. This poster presents findings from a study where we surveyed 105 CS undergraduate students about their self-perceptions of technical competencies in their chosen CS professions, the mechanisms to develop their competencies, as well as their motivations behind attaining these skill sets. Preliminary analysis of this data indicates that most CS students (93.3%), identified themselves into 7 different computing professions including Software Engineering (81.0%), Web Development (37.1%), User Experience (19.0%), and Computer Security (12.4%). They indicated using multiple mechanisms to develop their technical competencies including coursework, internship/professional experience, and research. Motivations behind their learning included self-interest as well as industry demands. We analyzed the relationships between students' skill proficiencies, motivations, and mechanisms for learning and found differences between novice, intermediate, and advanced learners. We found that students who self-assessed their proficiencies as novices in their chosen professional identity had a single mechanism for learning, most commonly coursework preparation. On the other hand, students who rated themselves as intermediate or advanced learners had multiple mechanisms and motivational factors behind attaining their skill set. These findings are important for better understanding students' learning needs and career aspirations. CS departments can use this information for better aligning their degree programs to student goals and creating pathways that ensure the development of CS students professional identity.

Pair Programming has been shown to increase productivity and code quality not only in professional software development but also in the context of programming education. The provision of broadband Internet access gave rise to Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) enabling two programmers to collaborate remotely. To gain insight into the benefits of DPP, we performed an empirical study on an object-oriented programming course where 62 students carried out assignments through a DPP platform. The goal of the study is to investigate, in the context of DPP, whether prior programming skills (assessed at the level of student, his or her partner and pair) and pair compatibility are related to student performance. To further examine the effect of DPP on learning outcomes, we have studied whether a pair’s performance on DPP assignments is related to the students’ grade. The findings indicate that the student’s actual skill and the pair’s actual skill affect his or her performance in an object-oriented programming course. The results also suggested that there is no association between pair compatibility and his or her own performance. Finally, pair performance on DPP assignments is related to the individual student performance in the final exams. Such evidence can be used to guide instructors when planning DPP assignments and especially when forming student pairs.

The Second International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education, TFPIE 2013, was held on May 13, 2013 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, professors, teachers, and all professionals interested in functional programming in education. Submissions were vetted by the TFPIE 2013 program committee using prevailing academic standards. The 2 articles in this volume were selected for publication as the result of this process. Tobin-Hochstadt and Van Horn report on their solution to the difficult transition between the first semester course in functional programming (using languages, programming environment, etc. intended for teaching) to the second semester course in object-oriented programming (with a production-oriented language, environment, etc.). Finding that this confusing circumstance made the key concepts hard to grasp for students, the authors present and evaluate a new introduction to the second semester course, based on the environment and languages the students used before, that focusses on key object-oriented concepts. Caldwell lays out an education narrative that focusses on reasoning about programs, using structural induction principles. He argues that more such formal reasoning should get more emphasis in programming education and demonstrates the feasibility thereof by reporting on his experiences using this narrative in the functional programming course at the University of Wyoming.

Teaching and learning operating system (OS) design is a core part of computer science education, which is highly demanding for both teaching and learning. This paper presents a tool-centric framework that aims at enhancing teaching operating system design for undergraduate students in computer science. The framework integrates multiple educational tools and methodologies with the aim of making the course more appealing for students while improving their comprehension and hands-on experience in OS design. The proposed framework extends existing educational theories and practices by focusing on aspects such as computational thinking, collaborative learning, and gamification in the learning process. The theoretical basics of this framework, the practical use of such a framework, and the expected influence on students’ learning outcome will be further explained in this paper. Empirical evidence, detailed examples and comparisons with existing frameworks underscore its potential impact on student learning outcomes.

This paper describes a lab project in computer communications and networks for senior undergraduate students in computer science and engineering. Given detailed specifications, students are asked to implement a data link layer (DLL) that integrates correctly with other provided layers to obtain a complete working network stack. This lab gives the students the opportunity to learn how to read formal specifications for a network project and write a complete piece of source code. It provides a comprehensive environment for students to write software for a network protocol, test and debug it, and observe its working behavior. In this paper, the authors present a technical description of the project and a discussion of related educational issues.

To attract and encourage the best and the brightest students to pursue state, federal and tribal government careers in cybersecurity, the National Science Foundation's CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program was created and funded in 2000 as part of the Federal Cyber Services training and education initiative. Only institutions with a strong and established academic program in cybersecurity are eligible to participate in the CyberCorps SFS program. For the past four years, Towson University (TU) has offered CyberCorps scholarships to highly-qualified undergraduate students in computer science with a track in computer security. The poster describes the TU cybersecurity curriculum and the extracurricular activities that have been essential in bringing the CyberCorps SFS program to TU and recruiting qualified undergraduate students, as well as, challenges and lessons learned.

Data have become a highly valued asset for governments, industries and individuals, and the management of these data collections remains a critical technical challenge.. The challenges of managing terabytes and exabytes of data and expanding data management to include other data modalities while maintaining the fundamental tenets of database management (data independence, data integrity, data consistency, etc) are important issues for any organization today. Published as five volumes with over 4000 pages, the Encyclopedia of Database Systems provides easy access to important concepts relevant information on all aspects of very large databases, data management, and database systems, including areas of current interest and research results of historical significance.. This comprehensive reference contains 1,300 illustrated entries, organized alphabetically. Each entry presents basic terminology, concepts, methods and algorithms, key results to date, references to the literature, and cross-references to other entries. Topics for the Encyclopedia — including areas of current interest as well as research results of historical significance — were selected by a distinguished international advisory board and written by world class experts in the field. Encyclopedia of Database Systems is designed to meet the needs of researchers, professors, graduate and undergraduate students in computer science and engineering. Industry professionals such as database specialists and software developers will also benefit from this reference work. [from publisher's website]

Though software testing courses are commonly taught as part of software engineering curricula, software testing is still a challenging issue in software engineering education. Students frequently see testing only as something that happens at the end of the development process. Two challenges can be recognized: "how to make the students recognize the relevance of the testing activity?" and "how to motivate the students on using testing ideas in their projects?". In an attempt to explore the impact of introducing testing practices throughout development, during the past Fall semester we modified the project requirements in a course on object-oriented analysis and design offered to the undergraduate students in computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. Our idea was to require the students to start thinking about testing as early as possible, by including testing-related practices in all phases of the development process. This paper presents the details of the testing approach used in the course and discusses the results we obtained, in terms of the students' attitudes and learning.

11752127 2109SPi-5 4 3 2 1 0 To our families PrefaceWe are in an information era where generating and storing large amounts of data are commonplace.A growing number of organizations routinely handle terabytes and exabytes of data, and individual digital data collections easily reach multiple gigabytes.Along with the increases in volume, the modality of digitized data that requires efficient management and the access modes to these data have become more varied.It is increasingly common for business and personal data collections to include images, video, voice, and unstructured text; the retrieval of these data comprises various forms, including structured queries, keyword search, and visual access.Data have become a highly valued asset for governments, industries and individuals, and the management of these data collections remains a critical technical challenge.Database technology has matured over the past four decades and is now quite ubiquitous in many applications that deal with more traditional business data.The challenges of expanding data management to include other data modalities while maintaining the fundamental tenets of database management (data independence, data integrity, data consistency, etc.) are issues that the community continues to work on.The lines between database management and other fields such as information retrieval, multimedia retrieval, and data visualization are increasingly blurred.This multi-volume Encyclopedia of Database Systems provides easy access to important concepts on all aspects of database systems, including areas of current interest and research results of historical significance.It is a comprehensive collection of over 1,250 in-depth entries (3,067 including synonyms) that present coverage of the important concepts, issues, emerging technology and future trends in the field of database technologies, systems, and applications.The content of the Encyclopedia was determined through wide consultations.We were assisted by an Advisory Board in coming up with the overall structure and content.Each of these areas were put under the control of Area Editors (70 in total) who further developed the content for each area, soliciting experts in the field as contributors to write the entries, and performed the necessary technical editing.Some of them even wrote entries themselves.Nearly 1,000 authors were involved in writing entries.The intended audience for the Encyclopedia is technically broad and diverse.It includes anyone concerned with database system technology and its applications.Specifically, the Encyclopedia can serve as a valuable and authoritative reference for students, researchers and practitioners who need a quick and authoritative reference to the subject of databases, data management, and database systems.We anticipate that many people will benefit from this reference work, including database specialists, software developers, scientists and engineers who need to deal with (structured, semi-structured or unstructured) large datasets.In addition, database and data mining researchers and scholars in the many areas that apply database technologies, such as artificial intelligence, software engineering, robotics and computer vision, machine learning, finance and marketing are expected to benefit from the Encyclopedia.We would like to thank the members of the Advisory Board, the Editorial Board, and the individual contributors for their help in creating this Encyclopedia.The success of the Encyclopedia could not have been achieved without the expertise and the effort of the many contributors.Our sincere thanks also go to Springer's editors and staff, including Jennifer Carlson, Susan Lagerstrom-Fife, Oona Schmid, and Susan Bednarczyk for their support throughout the project.Finally, we would very much like to hear from readers for any suggestions regarding the Encyclopedia's content.With a project of this size and scope, it is quite possible that we may have missed some concepts.It is also possible that some entries may benefit from revisions and clarifications.We are committed to issuing periodic updates and we look forward to the feedback from the community to improve the Encyclopedia.

The purpose of this research is to develop problem-based learning and concept mapping by using a block-based programming model (PBL-CBp model) and to evaluate the appropriateness of the PBL-CBp model. The research will be divided into two parts. The first part will be about learning style development and will study the theories and ideas which relate to problem-based learning, the programming process and the concept mapping and block-based programming. It will synthesise the steps in the problem-based learning method, and the steps in the program process and design the learning steps by using problem-based concept mapping and block-based programming. The second part will consist of an evaluation of the appropriateness of the model. An appropriateness questionnaire for the PBL-CBp model will be created and the PBL-CBp model will be submitted to five experts for improvement.

The effects of dynamic and static visualizations in understanding a topic in an undergraduate course were reported. An experimental study with two groups of students totaling 38, investigated the effect of using static graphics and text over dynamic visuals with the same amount of text. For the study, two versions of a computer-based learning on a computer science subject, for the topic of memory management in operating systems were developed and served as a learning material. To test on the effectiveness, students were given a test on recall and transfer of knowledge after studying the learning material. Initial analysis of results indicates no statistical difference between the scores for the two versions and suggests that dynamic visuals, by themselves, do not necessarily improve student understanding.

Learning to create well-designed and robust Java programs requires, besides a good understanding of the language, a significant amount of practice. In this paper we present the JavaFest, a collaborative learning technique for teaching Java to beginning programmers. A JavaFest is a group exercise that instructors can add to their repertoire of teaching techniques. It provides an opportunity for students to practice programming in a motivating but non-threatening environment, and to learn from the experience of their peers. Moreover, a JavaFest allows the instructor to gain insight into the current standing of the students in her class.We describe the concept of a JavaFest and present three case studies in the form of three concrete JavaFests we developed and evaluated in our own object-oriented programming course. The general idea of a JavaFest, and the three specific examples we describe and evaluate, can easily be adopted to enhance any Java programming course.

This paper outlines the effectiveness of an undergraduate mentoring program offered through the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland in retaining historically marginalized undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (STEM-CS) majors. Each undergraduate teacher/mentor (called an Ambassador) is responsible for providing support for current university students or for K-12 computing outreach programs. Enrollment and survey data show that the Ambassador program is successful in retaining undergraduate computing majors in STEM-CS. Ambassadors indicated that they appreciated the community aspect of the Ambassador program and they felt empowered to solve diversity problems in STEM-CS.

Dear Readers, At the end of this year, it gives me great pleasure to announce the twelfth regular issue of 2024. In this issue, various topical aspects of computer science are covered in 5 articles by 14 authors from 5 countries. I would like to thank all the authors for their sound research and the editorial board for the highly valuable review effort and suggestions for improvement. These contributions, together with the generous support of the consortium members, maintain the quality of our journal. I am looking forward to continuing my work as Managing Editor-in-Chief with the J.UCS community also in 2025.  In an ongoing effort to further strengthen our journal, I would like to expand the editorial board: If you are a tenured associate professor or above with a strong publication record, you are welcome to apply to join our editorial board. We are also interested in high-quality proposals for special issues on new topics and trends. Please consider yourself and encourage your colleagues to submit high-quality articles or special issue proposals to our journal. Finally, we are preparing to join the KOALA Cluster for Computer Science and Mathematics, making some minor organizational adjustments. We are switching to the CC BY license, and all metadata is accessible under the CC0 license. We are very grateful for the financial support for the next three years.  In this regular issue, I am very pleased to introduce the following 5 accepted articles: Marija Kuštelega, Renata Mekovec, and Ahmed Shareef from Croatia have conducted a systematic literature review to find out how the current research on the digital twin implementations has been positioned in front of practical challenges focused on privacy and security issues. Mehtap Ülker and A. Bedri Özer from Turkiye address in their research a fine-tuning BART-based model which generates a scientific summary by selecting important words from the text of the input document. Alessander Osorio, Paulo Roberto Ferreira Jr., and Gerson Geraldo H. Cavalheiro from Brazil introduce a case study conducted with undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science, involving guided reading of scientific papers, and recording students’ perceptions of adherence to a set of guidelines for the presentation of scientific results. Ruan Visser, Trieko Grobler, and Marcel Dunaiski from South Africa address the gap in natural language processing for Southern African languages, and present an in-depth analysis of language model development under resource-constrained conditions. Last but not least, Seyedeh Aridis Ahadi, Kian Jazayeri, and Sahand Tebyani from Cyprus propose in their research an integrated framework for the identification of suicidal thoughts in social media through the implementation of a layered classifier model consisting of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Season greetings to all of you, relaxing holidays and ‘Enjoy Reading’!  Best regards, Christian Gütl, Managing Editor-in-Chief Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

This study explores the intricate nature of the teaching methods and instructional strategy in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) utilized by teachers in selected higher education institutions in the Philippines. Through purposive sampling, the study includes 41 OOP teachers and offers an inquiry into their pedagogical approaches and strategies for instructing OOP to their students. The study also takes into account the resources and project requirements in OOP through an online survey. The study also looks at the student difficulties observed by the teachers while teaching OOP course. The data analysis utilized are descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and Google Colaboratory. The findings show that there is a wide range of instructional approaches, from conventional lectures to practical coding exercises. The results emphasize that hands-on coding is the preferred teaching method while giving hands-on activities is the preferred instructional strategy to develop and challenge the students’ programming ability, both received an outstanding 100% response. The Spearman correlation between the used teaching methods and instructional strategies, rho (ρ) of 0.42, p < 0.05, indicating a significant moderate positive relationship, suggesting that educators who utilized varied teaching methods also tend to use more instructional strategy in their teaching practices. Given the dynamic nature of programming paradigms and the wide range of student aptitudes, a customized approach to OOP teaching is necessary. The study provides practical insights to increase teaching effectiveness by highlighting important areas in the pedagogical environment that require adjustment. The study's findings have global significance in the rapidly evolving field of computer science and information technology education.