Exponential Competence of Computer Science and Software Engineering Undergraduate Students

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of the software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role. The present study aims to analyse the situation to explore what restricts computer science and software engineering students from taking up a testing career in the software industry. To conduct this study, we surveyed 88 Pakistani students taking computer science or software engineering degrees. The results showed that the present study supports previous work into the unpopularity of testing compared to other software life cycle roles. Furthermore, the findings of our study showed that the role of tester has become a social role, with as many social connotations as technical implications.

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of the software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role. The present study aims to analyze the situation to explore what restricts computer science and software engineering students from taking up a testing career in the software industry. To conduct this study, we surveyed 88 Pakistani students taking computer science or software engineering degrees. The results showed that the present study supports previous work into the unpopularity of testing compared to other software life cycle roles. Furthermore, the findings of our study showed that the role of tester has become a social role, with as many social connotations as technical implications.

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates improved teaching of formal methods; systematic highlighting of formal methods within existing, ‘classical’ computer science courses; and the inclusion of a compulsory formal methods course in computer science and software engineering curricula. These recommendations are based on the observations that formal methods are an essential and cost-effective means to increase software quality; however computer science and software engineering programmes typically fail to provide adequate training in formal methods; and thus there is a lack of computer science graduates who are qualified to apply formal methods in industry. This white paper is the result of a collective effort by authors and participants of the 1st International Workshop on Formal Methods – Fun for Everybody which was held in Bergen, Norway, 2–3 December 2019. As such, it represents insights based on learning and teaching computer science and software engineering (with or without formal methods) at various universities across Europe.

The goals of computer science department and software engineering courses are not always clear as they could be, and exactly how much of a computer science curriculum should be spent on software engineering topics at the expense of topics with more immediate relevance to computer science majors is far from clear. Computer science students are sometimes skeptical about the relevance of software engineering course topics, particularly those who have had some experience in industry. They report that the techniques and procedures covered in standard software engineering texts are seldom used in industry. There is not enough communication between Industry and Academia, and graduates often must be re-trained for their new jobs. This is a proposal for a modification in the approach to software engineering education for computer science majors, and for clarification of the goals of computer science programs, and calls for procedures to increase the relevancy of computer science and software engineering courses to meet the needs of industry.

This paper describes our experiences using Active Learning in four first-year computer science and industrial engineering courses at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Chile. This work corresponds to the implementation stage of the curriculum reform using a CDIO-based approach currently underway at the School of Engineering. Before this reform, students had only one introductory course to their field of study, meeting one hour a week. After the reform, computer science students take an Introduction to Computer Science course and a Programming Laboratory. Similarly, the industrial engineering program now includes an Introduction to Industrial Engineering and an Engineering Communication course. These courses have been designed using CDIO standards 1, 4 and 8 as guidelines and have been formulated to include active learning in its many forms such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, case studies, small group discussions, oral presentations and reflective memos. The redesign impact was assessed via anonymous student surveys and reflective memos. Our results show improved student understanding of their professional endeavour and increased student motivation for their engineering programs. Student surveys registered high degrees of satisfaction with active learning techniques, working in teams, and receiving immediate feedback from instructors and peers.

This research shows an audience of fellow computer science teachers that there is benefit in testing college student's scientific reasoning skills and that the students increase their logical thinking skills in computer science classes when they are presented with real world problems, engaged in group activities, and given hands-on experiments.Students' scientific reasoning skills from several different computer science courses are analyzed and tested before and after taking the computer science course to measure their improvement in logical thinking. The higher order thinking skills test results are compared, and the overall class and individual student improvement between the classes that use different teaching strategies are analyzed. Also, the test results are compared with students' ability to perform adequately in a computer science course. This information is valuable to advisors when placing students in computer science courses.In the assessments of students' entering knowledge and evaluations of students' thinking improvement, the students' individual higher order thinking skills as well as their overall level of cognitive development are analyzed. Through the analysis of their individual skills and level of thinking, one can expand conclusions about the students' and teacher's performance over time.

Music technology is known to have the ability to enhance creativity and creative development among students. A high level of engagement has been shown among students who studied and developed musical projects, and among students who were intellectually involved in the process of meaningful exploration. When students develop a music technology project, they use their software design skills to build and combine different artistic and computational components. Here we present a creative education method for computer science and software engineering students, it uses Muzilator, a plugin-based web platform that enables developers to develop a project as a set of independent web applications (plugins). Students can share their plugins with others or use plugins developed by others. We examined 75 projects of teams of computer science students who participated in a Computer Music course. We studied the characteristics of these projects and Muzilator’s effectiveness as a creative education and collaboration tool. Some of our results show that Muzilator-based projects received higher creativity and multidisciplinarity ratings than did other projects, and that high-risk projects were more creative and artistic than low-risk ones. We also found a gender-dependency: women tended more than men to develop interactive applications, while men tended to choose more theoretic (algorithmic), non-interactive projects. Keywords: educational method, creativity, music education, software design, multidisciplinarity. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-11-01 Publication date: April 30 th 2021

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify how Advanced level Mathematics and Mathematics course units offered at university level do impact on the academic performance of theoretical Computer Science course units. Background: In Sri Lankan state universities, students have been enrolled only from the Physical Science stream to do a degree program in Computer Science. In addition to that, universities have been offering some course units in Mathematics to provide the required mathematical maturity to Computer Science undergraduates. Despite of this it is observed that the failure rates in fundamental theoretical Computer Science course units are much higher than other course units offered in the general degree program every year. Methodology : Academic records comprised of all 459 undergraduates from three consecutive batches admitted to the degree program in Computer Science from a university were considered for this study. Contribution: This study helps academics in identifying suitable curricula for Mathematics course units to improve students’ performance in theoretical Computer Science courses. Findings: Advanced level Mathematics does not have any significant effect on the academic performance of theoretical Computer Science course units. Even though all Mathematics course units offered were significantly correlated with academic performance of every theoretical Computer Science course unit, only the Discrete Mathematics course unit highly impacted on the academic performance of all three theoretical Computer Science course units. Further this study indicates that the academic performance of female undergraduates is better than males in all theoretical Computer Science and Mathematics course units. Future Research: Identifying other critical success factors contributing to the students’ academic performance of the theoretical Computer Science through empirical studies

According to the problem that the students learning is passive and less interest in class study, a new scheme of merging life scene and project implement is presented in C programming. This method can motivate students interest in C programming learning, changing passive learning into active learning. Three years experiments of about 600 students in computer science and software engineering show that this method can activate students helping them to deeply understand abstract theory and rigid syntax rules, build up programming literacy, thus promote their technical knowledge grasp ability, programming ability and professional ability.

Despite great effort in research and teaching as well as in raising women’s quotas in the public sector and in enterprises, a gender gap in computer science can still be observed. The reasons are manifold, including the lack of interest of girls because of existing stereotypes of male nerds, misconceptions in the field of computer science, and concrete differences in students’ self-concept and performance. Girls do not choose schools or studies in the field of computer science because working on computers or coding is unattractive to them. Research shows poorer performance, missing interest, and lower self-concept for girls in secondary computing education as well as a high dropout rate of female students in computer science courses at the bachelor’s level. Software development exams contribute to those high dropout rates, and women often choose a different subject or even stop their university education altogether. This leads to fewer female employees in the field of computer science, and this situation calls for special measures at several levels. The current paper provides an overview of the initiatives of our university that aim to address several aspects of the gender gap. The programs offered aim to (1) increase interest in computer science and recruit (highly) gifted girls for our talent programs, (2) recruit and support female bachelor’s and master’s students in computer science, and (3) redesign programming courses and teaching materials to reduce the gender gap in performance and support, especially for female students. This study also describes a cyber tutoring program in which highly gifted girls between 13 and 16 years collaborate with and are supervised by female role models in higher positions in STEM. The evaluation results gained in the first year of this case study are promising and suggest that the extension and further development of the program would be advantageous.

There is a critical need for timely and usable curriculum development materials for teaching user interface development to software engineering and computer science students. An updated version of the Software Engineering Institute's curriculum module on User Interface Development has been released. This paper provides an overview of the module, its history, and how it has been used.At the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University there is a Curriculum Development Project as part of the Education Program (Gibbs, 1989). A major goal of the curriculum development project is to devise model curricula and support-materials for teaching all topics in software engineering. For topics such as unit testing, software design, requirements analysis, and so on, there are curriculum modules to help teachers prepare courses. I have written, and recently revised, a module on User Interface Development (Perlman, 1989b), described in detail below. It has proven to be useful to all people interested in the teaching of user interface development to software engineers. Some of my experiences with the module are summarized in Perlman (1988).The module is not a book nor a course, but contains information to help others prepare short- or full-term courses on user interface development.

Utah Valley University (UVU) was awarded an NSF Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) grant in 2014 to strengthen outcomes for students in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, and electrical engineering through Leadership, Engagement, Academic Mentoring, and Preparation (LEAP). The LEAP project was completed in September 2021. This paper presents the impact of the program on the institution and its computing and engineering programs. Also, it presents the effect of the high-impact practices in this program in retention and completion of computer science and engineering students. High-impact practices reported on include Capstone Courses, Collaborative Projects, First-Year Experiences, Internships, Undergraduate Research, and Writing Intensive Courses.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is not only seen by computer science departments as an optional free and low cost technology to support their IT infrastructure and administrative duties, but also as a methodology to improve pedagogy and provide opportunities for students to learn. As a result, many teachers are turning to FOSS projects and communities as effective tools to teach computer science courses and give their students significant real-world experience. However, few teaching and learning models exist that can help computer science teachers provide guidance and mentorship for their students' involvement in FOSS projects. In order to address this gap in computer science education, this paper presents a teaching and learning model that was evaluated using a series of pilot studies conducted with software engineering students. Experiences and lessons learnt from the pilot studies shows one possible way teachers can guide students' involvement in FOSS projects and how this approach can be integrated into a formally structured curriculum. Index Terms—Capstone projects, computer science education, curriculum design, open source software communities, open source software projects, software engineering.

After some years of preparatory experiments, in 1982 a curriculum has been installed at the University of Linz that gives graduate students of computer science and mathematics the possibility to specialize in the field of symbolic compuation (as an essential part of Computer-Aided Mathematical Problem Solving = CAMP). Students of computer science are supposed to have most of the necessary software / hardware / system background and are offered a series of courses on the formal / logical / mathematical / linguistic aspects of the field. Students of mathematics are supposed to catch up with the students of computer science with respect to the software / hardware / system aspects by forcing them to pass at least those courses of computer science that are an indispensible prerequisite for the field of symbolic computation. Then the students of mathematics are exposed to the series of courses on the formal / logical / mathematical / linguistic aspects of symbolic computation. The three main subareas of symbolic computation taught are: computer algebra, computational logic and automatic programming.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Main Menu Session 1526 Event-Driven Computing Projects for Software Engineering Education Marjorie Skubic and James Laffey Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department / School of Information Science and Learning Technologies University of Missouri-Columbia skubicm@missouri.edu / laffeyj@missouri.edu Abstract There is a growing need in the software industry for the development of systems with a dynamic, event-driven behavior, such as interactive human-computer interfaces, client-server architectures, and embedded systems. Developing successful, event-driven software requires a paradigm shift from traditional program development, and new curriculum approaches are needed to help computer science and engineering students develop competencies. In this paper, we describe an effort to address this problem through hands-on projects that provide experience in developing dynamic, event-driven systems and let the students physically see the results of their efforts. We describe our project testbed and exercises, based on the smart home theme, and report our experiences with using the testbed in an actual course setting. Although the proof of concept is being evaluated in a software engineering course, the project theme and testbed could be used in other computer-related courses, such as object-oriented programming, embedded systems, or even a first level computer science course. Introduction There is a growing need in the software industry for the development of systems with a dynamic, event-driven behavior, e.g., interactive human-computer interfaces, client-server architectures, and embedded systems1. Developing successful, event-driven software requires a paradigm shift from the traditional, sequential program development. Unlike sequential programs, event-driven software must work correctly in an environment with concurrent processes, uncertainties, and dynamic, external entities; indeed, the program may execute differently each time because of these outside effects. New curriculum approaches are needed to develop programming competencies for event- driven software 2. Students do not typically get significant experience in studying or developing event-driven software development. As a result, they have difficulties learning behavioral models for dynamic software systems and understanding the concepts necessary to design, program, and test such systems. To prepare students for their future careers as software engineers, they need experience in realistic projects that develop event-driven software 3. Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education Main Menu