Computer science students often fail to connect what they learn in one course to another course or to the workplace. This can reflect a failure to transfer learning between contexts. The main goal of this article is to explore how transfer of learning can be facilitated in the most common teaching styles in computer science. In addition, we will discuss how common teaching strategies for develo...

Many students at German universities have difficulties to cope with the introductory courses on theoretical computer science, which results in very high dropout and failure rates. In the past years we have experimented with a variety of improvements to the theory course held at the University of Potsdam, Germany. During last winter semester we improved the setup of the course by taking into acc...

Designing information systems according to user requirements is crucial for software developers. In computer science education, acquiring necessary social skills to elicit and define those requirements is underdeveloped. We introduce a studentcentered, project-based learning approach with a student team project, which tries to support these learning processes. Based on existing examples for pro...

In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) attributed substantial problems in the quality of American medicine to four domains: growing complexity of science and technology; the increase in chronic conditions; a poorly organized delivery system; and constraints on exploiting the revolution in information technology (IT). Although all of these domains hav...

We introduced “Computer Science Unplugged” to our classes in junior and senior high schools. “Unplugged” is an education method of computer science without students using a computer at all. For our classes, we developed original teaching materials and methods for Unplugged. As a result, the students could learn the topics of computer science with interest by using Unplugged. They enjoyed the ga...

T HE GOAL OF THIS PROJECT is to develop a unique simulation environment that can be used to increase students' in terest and expertise in Computer Science curriculum. Handson experience with physical or simulated equipment is an essential ingredient for learning, but many approaches to training develop a separate piece of equipment or software for each topic area. We describe the development of...

In this paper, we expose some exercises that we use to teach formal specification for 1 year students.

Misconceptions – This notion is one of the grand themes of educational research in general and science education in particular. Students’ misconceptions of various scientific principles are recurrent topics in numerous studies, in for instance physics (D. E. Brown, 1992; Jones, 1991), biology (C. R. Brown, 1990; Odom, 1995) and chemistry (Goh, 1993; Nicoll, 2001; Sanger & Greenbowe, 1999). The ...

Teaching students the complete process of circuit design, simulation, implementation, test and debug is a daunting task. Even though design description tools and circuit compilers have kept up with the increasing levels of integration found in current implementation media such as FPGAs and microcontrollers, it has become increasingly difficult for students to test and debug the complex hardware...