Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges

The traditional view of teaching and learning that assumes an instructor is standing in front of the room lecturing to students seated in neatly organized rows of desks is quickly evolving to models of teaching and learning that challenge these ...

The dire need for information technology professionals is well documented. By most projections, the growth of jobs will outpace the production of computing graduates through 2018. The computing profession also has among the lowest participation of women ...

Is it possible to excite students about learning the mathematical principles that underlie high-quality software? Can we teach them to apply these principles using modern, internet-based software tools? Can this be accomplished without displacing ...

As computer science educators we have an ethical responsibility to teach our students healthy computer use. In this paper we make the case for this ethical responsibility; examine the pathomechanics of the human computer interface; present a holistic ...

Ambient displays have been a major area of research within the ubiquitous computing field since the early days of Mark Weiser's vision. Although many forms of ambient displays have been built, they all require a significant amount of development time. ...

Colleges utilize various methods of placing incoming students in classes, but many methods are time intensive, have limited scope, or lack precision. After an older LISP-based expert system had difficulty placing students, Grinnell College needed a ...

The popularity and proliferation of mobile applications is undeniable, and the tools are available for undergraduates to explore mobile application development within the curriculum. In a sense, mobile application development is like any other kind of ...

Information Systems and Applied Technologies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale is a program with around 300 on-campus students that encompasses both Electronic Systems Technologies and Information Systems Technologies students. Both types of ...

Education research indicates that computer tutoring systems can positively impact learning in mathematics and the sciences. When integrated into a competent and motivated curriculum, computer tutors enable students to engage in deep exploration of a ...

With the decrease of student enrollment in Computer Science and Information Systems programs, we need to change the way we deliver first-year computer programming curricula. Introductory courses have the potential to attract and to retain students. This ...

Model-based testing is an increasingly important software-testing technique that CS and IS students must become familiar with. With ModelTester, students write an extended finite-state machine model for the software under test (SUT). ModelTester then ...

We present UMLGrader, a system designed to provide automated feedback to students on class diagrams written in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Given a diagram which is constructed to model a tightly constrained problem, the tool compares the ...

App Inventor for Android allows people with little or no programming experience to create smart phone applications on the Android platform. This is accomplished by using drag-and-drop UI design and blocks-oriented visual programming. We offered an ...

The GridWorld case study is a collection of java classes that simulate a simple world environment. It is available for free from The College Board and is primarily used as a required part of the high school AP Computer Science curriculum. It provides a ...

Computer Science faculty generally agree that our students should study mathematics. But there are three major challenges to address in order to effectively incorporate mathematics into the CS curriculum. Those challenges can be framed in the form of ...

Access control systems have become significantly more sophisticated in order to meet the security demands of Internet-based computing. Students must be trained formally to deal with the complexity of these modern systems, to ensure correctness and to ...

This paper describes a visualization tool DESvisual that helps students understand and instructors teach the building blocks of symmetric encryption. In particular, the tool depicts the primitive operations required to perform the initial permutation ...

In the childhood game of "rock-paper-scissors", two participants select one of three different gestures. The selected gestures are then compared using the following rule set: rock crushes scissors, scissors cuts paper, and paper covers rock. Ties are ...

Over the past decade applications have been moving from the desktop into the cloud. After extensive searching, the only integrated development environments has emerged in cloud computing. The Java Wiki Integrated Development Environment (JavaWIDE) is ...

A set of digital labs has been developed for both Electronic and Information Technology students that utilizes basic Boolean algebra concepts in order to construct a simple 4-bit ALU. These labs can be built using inexpensive GAL ICs and a simple GAL ...

This workshop covers the pathomechanics of the human computer interface and explains why unhealthy computer use is particularly dangerous for computer science students. Participants will learn how to practice healthy computer use with four strategies: ...

Despite the excellent opportunities and salaries in computing careers, participation by females has declined over the past twenty years (see [1]). Two of the major factors contributing to this decline are the reduced numbers of females starting and ...

Matthias Felleisen was awarded the 2011 SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education for his and his research team's work on the TeachScheme! project, which was begun in 1995, and is now called "Program by Design". This ...

The tutorial introduces the NetLogo programming language and presents an approach to an introductory computer science course based on multi-agent simulation and NetLogo. This course has been taught at Middlebury College in Vermont for the past five ...

Studio-based learning (SBL), a pedagogical technique that promotes learning through the iterative construction and review of problem solutions, is becoming increasingly popular in computer science education. This paper reviews the use of SBL in ...

This paper describes the use of algorithmic art as a context for teaching programming and computational thinking. We show how students can learn to apply mathematics and computer programming to create algorithmic art, and we record changes in their ...

3D Stereoscopy is a rich and fun interdisciplinary context for engaging students across campus. Students can practice programming and also experience how computing can be used as a tool for exploration and analysis of scientific (or other) questions.

This tutorial will cover docutils, an open-source (Python) package originally intended for documentation. We will emphasize its implementation language, Restructured Text, or ReST. ReST converts the same simple, readable ASCII-based format into polished ...

In this paper, the authors present research to determine whether or not Java is a relevant programming language in the gaming industry. The objective is to determine if it would be advantageous for a career-oriented college to use Java to teach game ...

The Internet Connectivity module is a short assignment covering distributed computing and networking. The Internet Connectivity module is part of the curriculum created for the Northwest Distributed Computer Science Department and is built upon the ...