Thesis (Ph. D., Computer Science)--University of Idaho, August 20, 2008. / Major professor: Jim Alves-Foss. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-110). Also available online (PDF file) by subscription or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1978. / Title from title page screen, viewed Jan. 25, 2005. Dissertation Committee: John McCarthy (chair), Vernon A. Adams, Ronald S. Halinski, James A. Hallam, J.H. McGrath. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-177) and abstract. Also available in print.

It is well established that both learning and teaching programming are difficult tasks. Difficulties often occur due to weak mental models and common misconceptions. This study proposes a method of teaching programming that both encourages high-fidelity mental models and attempts to minimise misconceptions in novice programmers, through the use of metaphors and manipulatives. The elements in ActionWorld with which the students interact are realizations of metaphors. By simple example, a variable has a metaphorical representation as a labelled box that can hold a value. The dissertation develops a set of metaphors which have several core requirements: metaphors should avoid causing misconceptions, they need to be high-fidelity so as to avoid failing when used with a new concept, students must be able to relate to them, and finally, they should be usable across multiple educational media. The learning style that ActionWorld supports is one which requires active participation from the student - the system acts as a foundation upon which students are encouraged to build their mental models. This teaching style is achieved by placing the student in the role of code interpreter, the code they need to interpret will not advance until they have demonstrated its meaning via use of the aforementioned metaphors. ActionWorld was developed using an iterative developmental process that consistently improved upon various aspects of the project through a continual evaluation-enhancement cycle. The primary outputs of this project include a unified set of high-fidelity metaphors, a virtual-machine API for use in similar future projects, and two metaphor-testing games. All of the aforementioned deliverables were tested using multiple quality-evaluation criteria, the results of which were consistently positive. ActionWorld and its constituent components contribute to the wide assortment of methods one might use to teach novice programmers.

The undergraduate Computer Science program at Virginia Tech is the largest in the Commonwealth of Virginia, of which a key component is ``CS 1044: Introduction to Programming'', and is typical of a first course in computer programming throughout the USA. While the student access to learning resources has improved considerably with the development of web-based assets, students are still expected to use the same sophisticated program development tools as are used in industry. The perceived complexity of the learning environment currently in use drives many women and minority students from the Computer Science program. A great deal of attention has been paid to the need to administer the student assignments and the grading system for this course, so as to minimize the teaching/grading load, but little attention has been paid to the methodologies of learning the material through practice. The work reported herein is intended to improve the pedagogy of this course by creating and integrating teaching/learning tools that better manage the student's engagement in the use of program development activities. Following the implementation of a three-element software system involving an interpreter for the C-language, a program development environment, and a data-monitoring/collectiondevice, the system was deployed in support of the freshman course in parallel to the commercial system commonly used. The experiment concentrated on examining the impact of the simplified development environment and the effort required for students to complete assigned programming projects. / Ph. D.

Open Source Software (OSS) communities are homogenous and their lack of diversity is of concern to many within this field. This problem is becoming more pronounced as it is the practice of many technology companies to use OSS participation as a factor in the hiring process, disadvantaging those who are not a part of this community. We should expect that any field would have a population that reflects the general population given no constraints. The constraints within OSS are documented as being a hostile environment for women and minorities to participate in. Additionally OSS communities rely predominately on volunteers to create and maintain source code, documentation, and user interface as well as the organizational structure of the project. The volunteer nature of OSS projects creates a need for an ongoing pool of participants. This research addresses the lack of diversity along with the continual need for new members by developing a pedagogical paradigm that uses a collaborative environment to promote participation in an OSS project by diverse students. This collaborative environment used a Communities of Practice (CoP) framework to design the course, the indicators of which were used to operationalize the collaboration. The outcomes of this course not only benefit the students by providing them with skills necessary to continue participation and experience for getting a job, but also provide a diverse pool of volunteers for the OSS community. This diverse pool shows promise of creating a more diverse culture within OSS. In the development of this pedagogical paradigm this research looked primarily at student���s perception of the importance of their group members and mentors provided to guide their participation in and contribution to an OSS community. These elements were used to facilitate the formation of a CoP. Self-efficacy was also used as a measure; an increase in self-efficacy is associated with the successful formation of a CoP. Finally the intent to continue, as reported by students, was measured to determine the potential contribution to the OSS community overall. This research was designed to use collaboration to support the formation of a CoP within the groups formed between students based on common interests in the OSS project. Additionally students were provided with a mentor from the community to assist in finding paths to contribute. The Ubuntu project was chosen for its commitment to diversity and its reputation for being a welcoming environment to newcomers, reducing the risk of negative community interactions for students. Written reflections were gathered at mid and end of term and used in conjunction with transcripts or reports of group meetings as well as emails between mentors and mentees. Additionally self-efficacy was measured at the beginning and end of the term. The results of this study show that this pedagogical paradigm supports student contribution. Contribution levels were found to be associated with the level of the formation of a CoP within each group and the use of mentors, as well as attending a live, hands-on bug triage demo and the Global Jam, to gather resources. It was also evident that students intend to continue participating at a rate higher than the average rate for newcomers trying to contribute without the type of support offered by this class. Further research into the examination of the use of reflective dialogue with mentors is recommended. It is also recommended that the results from the operationalization of the indicators of the formation of a CoP be used to assist in a more consistent formation of this important resource across more groups within the class. The results of this research point to the effectiveness of this paradigm to promote contributions to an OSS community. These contributions provide the skills students need to improve their attractiveness to future employers. This class also produced a number of students who intend to continue participating in OSS, providing a diverse pool of potential volunteers to the OSS community. / Graduation date: 2013

by Siu-yee Wong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Bibliography: leaves 39-41.

Este estudo procura identificar, medir e avaliar as práticas dos empregadores do Brasil e do Canadá em relação à gestão do capital intelectual de seus desenvolvedores de software, comumente chamados de programadores. O trabalho condensa, através da revisão e análise dos principais autores do assunto, os pressupostos básicos da boa gestão do capital intelectual. Tais pressupostos foram determinados especificamente para os desenvolvedores de software, que são agentes nucleares na indústria da tecnologia da informação, tecnologia essa que é onipresente em todas as instituições modernas. A partir desses pressupostos básicos, foram definidos 13 Índices de Capital Intelectual, que possibilitaram a criação de um questionário eletrônico disponibilizado na internet, no qual profissionais do Brasil e do Canadá responderam após serem convidados através do disparo em massa de mensagens de e-mail, gerando assim os dados primários. Os 13 Índices de Capital Intelectual propostos são: Índice de Instrução, Índice de Treinamento, Índice do Sistema de Conhecimento Organizacional, Índice Ocupacional, Índice de Satisfação, Índice Motivacional, Índice Vocacional, Índice de Coleguismo, Índice do Poder de Decisão (empowerment), Índice de Contato Direto com Clientes, Índice de Rotatividade, Índice Hierárquico e Índice do Papel Contábil. Através de uma metodologia original proposta pelo autor, os resultados da pesquisa de campo, fartamente ilustrados com gráficos, mostraram que os respondentes do Canadá obtiveram melhor resultado em 7 índices, enquanto que os brasileiros superaram os canadenses nos demais 6 índices. / This study aims to identify, measure, and evaluate the practices of employers in Brazil and Canada in relation to the management of intellectual capital of its software developers, commonly called programmers. The study condenses, through the review and analysis of the principal authors of the subject, the basic assumptions of the good management of intellectual capital. These assumptions were determined specifically for software developers, who are nuclear agents in the information technology industry, the technology that is omnipresent in all modern institutions. From these basic assumptions, were defined 13 Intellectual Capital Indexes, which enabled the creation of an electronic questionnaire available on the Internet, in which professionals from Brazil and Canada responded after being invited through a mass e-mail sending, generating the primary data. The 13 Intellectual Capital Indexes proposed are: Education Index, Training Index, Organizational Knowledge System Index, Occupational Index, Satisfaction Index, Motivational Index, Vocational Index, Comradeship Index, Empowerment Index, Index of Direct Contact with Customers, Turnover Index, Hierarchical Index, and Accounting Role Index. Using an original methodology proposed by the author, the results of field research, fully illustrated with charts, showed that respondents in Canada obtained better results in 7 indexes, while the Brazilians beat the Canadians in the other 6 indexes.

[Abstract]: The traditional approach to training novice programmers has been to provide explicit programming knowledge instruction but to rely on implicit instruction of programming strategies. Studies, reported in literature, have discovered universally poor results on standardised tests for novices studying under this traditional approach.This dissertation describes the explicit integration of programming strategies into instruction and assessment of novice programmers, and the impact of this change ontheir learning outcomes.An initial experiment was used to measure the performance of students studying under a traditional curriculum with implicitly taught programming strategies. Thisexperiment uncovered common flaws in the strategy skills of novices and revealed weaknesses in the curriculum. Incorporation of explicit strategy instruction wasproposed.To validate a model of strategies as being authentic and appropriate for novice instruction, an experiment with experts was conducted. Experts were asked to solvethree problems that a novice would typically be expected to solve at the end of an introductory programming course. Experts‟ solutions were analysed using Goal/PlanAnalysis and it was discovered that experts consistently applied plans, the subalgorithmic strategies suggested by Soloway (1986). It was proposed that plans could be adapted for explicit inclusion in an introductory programming curriculum.Initially a curriculum incorporating explicit strategy instruction was tested in an artificial setting with a small number of volunteers, divided into control andexperimental groups. The control group was taught using a simplified traditional curriculum and the experimental group were exposed to a curriculum which explicitly included programming strategies. Testing revealed that experimental group participants applied plans more than control group participants, who had been expected to learn these strategies implicitly. In interviews, experimental participants used strategy-related terminology and were more confident in the solutions they had created. These results justified a trial of the curriculum in an actual introductory programming course.When explicit instruction of programming strategies was incorporated into an actual introductory programming curriculum, novices achieved superior results whencompared to results from the initial experiment. Novices used strategies significantly more when these strategies were incorporated explicitly into instructional materialsand assessment items.This series of experiments focussed on explicitly teaching specific programming strategies rather than teaching problem-solving more generally. These experimentalresults demonstrate that explicit incorporation of programming strategies may improve outcomes for novices and potentially improve the potential of expertprogrammers in future.

End-user programmers are writing an unprecedented number of programs, due in large part to the significant effort put forth to bring programming power to end users. Unfortunately, this effort has not been supplemented by a comparable effort to increase the correctness of these often faulty programs. To address this need, we have been working towards bringing fault localization techniques to end users. In order to understand how end users are affected by and interact with such techniques, we conducted a think-aloud study, examining the interactive, human-centric ties between end-user debugging and a fault localization technique for the spreadsheet paradigm. Our results provide insights into the contributions such techniques can make to an interactive end-user debugging process. / Graduation date: 2004

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-236). Also available on the World Wide Web.