ABSTRACT
The first contact of freshmen students with computer thinking and programming languages is not an easy task. There are several strategies that can be used before, during and after face-to-face classes. Flipped classes are a way to save time in activities that can be better done in the form of previous work - guided by the teacher. A n d the time gained in person can be used in tasks that are much more productive than traditional lectures. This study is based on an introductory programming semester of post lockdown COVID-19, initially with 101 students, with the strategy of providing study materials for students to work on before class (as in flipped classes). We use attendance in classes, acce ss-work MOODLE, the two grades obtained during the semester, as well as some information about the student (age, course, gender, previous knowledge of programming languages), and the level that the students think it was their presence in classes and on MOODLE in the middle and at the end of the semester to measure the success of the experiment. It seems that this type of strategy can be excellent for students who attend classes weekly and do their homework, but it can be a cause of dropout if taken to the extreme. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This innovative practice full paper presents a case of teaching modeling, simulation, and performance evaluation course online during the COVID-19 pandemic for graduate students. The course includes theoretical and practical sessions with varying complexity. Students should have a good background in math, statistics, and probability. Students must also have good experience in one of the computer programming languages to solve the homework and work on the term project. The challenge is how to teach these topics online and engage the students in the course as they learn in face-to-face classes. Delivering the course using PowerPoint slides and a whiteboard is not suitable for teaching the class online. Therefore, there must be an alternative way to deliver the course online. We noticed a growing interest in using Jupyter Notebook in teaching, which motivated us to apply it to the mentioned course with some innovations. Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows us to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. We want to share our experience teaching this course online using Jupyter Notebook in this innovative practice. We will share the course development plan, delivery mode, lessons learned, and student feedback. I will also highlight maximizing the benefits of the Jupyter Notebook using add-ins and tools useful for teaching, such as converting the Jupyter Notebook to a slide show. Developing courses in Jupyter Notebook could be time-consuming and frustrating, especially if there are a lot of math equations, tables, and drawings. This effort pays off in terms of the quality of the instruction and learning, and it gives students a tool to help them practice and engage with the course material. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In early 2020, COVID-19 appeared and widely spread worldwide. It affected all vital sectors, including commercial activities and education. Most governments decided to temporarily close educational institutions, including schools and universities. Developed countries with adequate learning-management systems moved to the online teaching mode. Hence, the sudden transition from the traditional to online teaching mode has impacted learning outcomes. The ultimate goal of this paper is to develop a method for evaluating the experience of teaching online during epidemics. More precisely, it assesses the teaching of programming language courses in the computer science and engineering college at the University of Hail. It statistically measures the courses' learning outcomes in the online mode compared to the traditional mode. Perhaps surprisingly, the difference was not significant, which shed light on the positive side of the crisis. According to the obtained results, the experience of teaching online during an epidemic has led us to investigate the opportunities of using online teaching, especially for programming language courses. This highlighted opportunities for using online platforms as supportive teaching tools or even merging them with traditional teaching approaches at times when attending classes on campus is impossible. Finally, to ensure best practices, the author recommended some guidelines to follow. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Computer programming is a complex field that requires rigorous practice in programming code writing and learning skills, which can be one of the critical challenges in learning and teaching programming. The complicated nature of computer programming requires an instructor to manage its learning resources and diligently generate programming-related questions for students that need conceptual programming and procedural programming rules. In this regard, automatic question generation techniques help teachers carefully align their learning objectives with the question designs in terms of relevancy and complexity. This also helps in reducing the costs linked with the manual generation of questions and fulfills the need of supplying new questions through automatic question techniques. This paper presents a theoretical review of automatic question generation (AQG) techniques, particularly related to computer programming languages from the year 2017 till 2022. A total of 18 papers are included in this study. one of the goals is to analyze and compare the state of the field in question generation before COVID-19 and after the COVID-19 period, and to summarize the challenges and future directions in the field. In congruence to previous studies, there is little focus given in the existing literature on generating questions related to learning programming languages through different techniques. Our findings show that there is a need to further enhance experimental studies in implementing automatic question generation especially in the field of programming. Also, there is a need to implement an authoring tool that can demonstrate designing more practical evaluation metrics for students. © 2022, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
All first-year students at the J. B. Speed School of Engineering (SSoE) at the University of Louisville (UofL) are required to complete a two-course sequence. The purpose of the two-course sequence is to introduce incoming students to the fundamentals and profession of engineering. The first course in the sequence is titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice I (ENGR 110) and primarily focuses on introduction to and practice with fundamental engineering skills. The second course Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111) is a makerspace-based course primarily focused on application and integration of the fundamentals learned in ENGR 110. ENGR 111 includes a variety of fundamental skills in its instruction, one of which is programming. Therefore, all disciplines of SSoE engineering students are exposed to the basics and applications of programming through this course sequence. Programming instruction in ENGR 111 is designed to include relevant software development skills that students might encounter in the engineering profession. The students have learned initial programming skills in their ENGR 110 course through the Python programming language. In ENGR 111, students practice programming skills learned in ENGR 110 on two different platforms: Arduino Microcontrollers (Arduino) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). In normal face-to-face semesters, students are put into teams of 3 to 4 and given modules to develop and practice these skills (two for Arduino, two for PLCs). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ENGR 111 was augmented into a synchronous remote course to avoid close proximity and shared tools in the makerspace. Arduino programming instruction was performed using Tinkercad (tinkercad.com), a website that allows for Arduino programming and circuitry simulations. PLC instruction was performed utilizing a free online PLC simulator website, “PLCfiddle” [1]. At the end of each semester, students take a survey on their perceptions of the course. Included in this survey are questions pertaining to programming instruction. These questions assess student confidence in programming and platform preference. Results of these questions from Spring 2019 (a makerspace iteration) and Spring 2021 (a remote iteration) are compared in this paper. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a new set of infrastructures and online interactive tools that can be employed to motivate students to learn programming languages. The tools were used to experiment in one of the introductory first-year engineering courses. The final project of the course requires implementing an AI program for a game called “Reversi''. Reversi is a medium to hard level programming project that has been used in the course for several years requiring an immediate restructuring. Furthermore, due to COVID-19 and the restriction of in-person teaching, it has been a challenge for educators to excite, support, and encourage students. The new infrastructure provided an interactive platform for the students to familiarize themselves with the Reversi game project. It also provided a leaderboard, an interactive scoreboard, allowing students to compete with their classmates. The tools can instantaneously synchronize to students' code submission to help students check their latest ranking among their classmates in real-time. This increased students' level of engagement and learning. In addition, it allowed students to collaborate with their fellow classmates and discuss their algorithms. The tools and platform developed can also be employed in other courses as well other programming games. The result from students' surveys and the active trend of the class online discussion forum indicates that the new online interactive system created a positive atmosphere and increased students' motivation in learning programming languages. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
We might come across lots of paralyzed patients in our day-to-day life. The cause of the condition could be due to trauma because of accidents, stroke, polio etc., Depending on the nerve response to the brain and spinal cord, the specific parts of the body or even the whole body become paralyzed accordingly. To make distance communication between the patient and caretaker easier, we have implemented an IoT based system to send and receive an SMS by using LabVIEW Software. The patient can send the SMS easily by hand movements. The message will be sent according to the direction of the patient's hand movement. This Software is used to send, read the data to the cloud and message will be sent to the caretaker's mobile simultaneously. We have also used GSM in our project to send the message as SMS. The main motto of this project is to send the message to the caretaker as fast as possible. Besides paralysed individuals, visually impaired persons and Covid patients in hospitals who are unable to use a cell phone and need to make contactless communication with physicians, can utilize it. This gadget can be used for a multitude of long-distance communications. The prototype is relatively inexpensive and portable. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
For health professionals such as pharmacists, we have teaching experience since opening the master's degree. A course, namely "Computer Systems and Principles of Programming for Pharmaceutical and Health Informatics"in Master Degree of Pharmacy (Health Informatics), was redesigned to improve learning outcomes. The programming module was set in the second part of the course after a midterm examination with the classical course structure. Therefore, there was no time left to assign an advanced project to students. When the programming module shifted to the upper part, students could spend self-study time of the lower module to create more advanced applications in pharmacy and health. Digital problem-based learning (DPBL) was applied to support students and instructors to communicate and collaborate their work in the real production environment. The course structure was redesigned in the 2020 academic year which the COVID-19 situation has interrupted the real face-to-face learning. Therefore, the full DPBL was used. In addition, a set of tools were introduced to students for working in the fully DPBL. After the course was finished, an evaluation of the applications from students was done by three instructors. Students could deliver more advanced web applications from DPBL than those from the simple assignments in the classical course structure. Furthermore, the redesigned course structure and DPBL were evaluated by students. The results suggested that the redesigned course structure and DPBL were used, and skills in programming languages were increased. © 2021 ACM.