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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 14, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-216). Also issued in print.

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Daniel A. Andresen / This thesis presents a curriculum designed for 5th and 6th grade students attending a summer camp for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The curriculum uses several concepts from educational theory and computer science education research. It also uses techniques such as cognitive apprenticeship, expansive framing, and scaffolded lessons to increase student learning outcomes. It was taught during two cohorts of a STEM summer camp. The curriculum is analyzed through self-efficacy surveys both before and after the class, measuring how students judged their own capability to use skills learned during the class. Analysis of the data shows that the increase in student self-efficacy has a medium to large effect size overall, as well as student self-efficacy with many computational thinking skills. Data from various population groups based on gender, previous STEM experience, and socio-economic status indicators is also analyzed. Finally, many areas of future work and improvement are presented and discussed. The outcome of this work is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the curriculum presented in increasing student self-efficacy with computational thinking skills, specifically by showing the links between content in the curriculum and specific computational thinking skills.

Proofs by induction are central to many computer science areas such as data structures, theory of computation, programming languages, program efficiency-time complexity, and program correctness. Proofs by induction can also improve students’ understanding of and performance with computer science concepts such as programming languages, algorithm design, and recursion, as well as serve as a medium for teaching them. Even though students are exposed to proofs by induction in many courses of their curricula, they still have difficulties understanding and performing them. This impacts the whole course of their studies, since proofs by induction are omnipresent in computer science. Specifically, students do not gain conceptual understanding of induction early in the curriculum and as a result, they have difficulties applying it to more advanced areas later on in their studies. The goal of my dissertation is twofold: 1. identifying sources of computer science students’ difficulties with proofs by induction, and 2. developing a new approach to teaching proofs by induction by way of an interactive and multimodal electronic book (e-book). For the first goal, I undertook a study to identify possible sources of computer science students’ difficulties with proofs by induction. Its results suggest that there is a close correlation between students’ understanding of inductive definitions and their understanding and performance of proofs by induction. For designing and developing my e-book, I took into consideration the results of my study, as well as the drawbacks of the current methodologies of teaching proofs by induction for computer science. I designed my e-book to be used as a standalone and complete educational environment. I also conducted a study on the effectiveness of my e-book in the classroom. The results of my study suggest that, unlike the current methodologies of teaching proofs by induction for computer science, my e-book helped students overcome many of their difficulties and gain conceptual understanding of proofs induction.

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code's functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper helps demystify refactoring by introducing an incremental approach for teaching refactoring on the college level. Through this hands-on approach, refactoring can become an integral component in the computer science curriculum and an innovative means of reinforcing software engineering principles and good development practices. The approach and three introductory lessons are presented in this paper.

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code's functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the fourth lesson of an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching refactoring on the college level. This lesson covers the creation of well formed object-oriented methods including characteristics for evaluating such methods. Through this hands-on approach, building well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring can be better understood and integrated into the computer science curriculum.