Learning motivation in e-learning facilitated computer programming courses

Computer programming skills constitute one of the core competencies that graduates from many disciplines, such as engineering and computer science, are expected to possess. Developing good programming skills typically requires students to do a lot of practice, which cannot sustain unless they are adequately motivated. This paper reports a preliminary study that investigates the key motivating factors affecting learning among university undergraduate students taking computer programming courses. These courses are supported by an e-learning system – Programming Assignment aSsessment System (PASS), which aims at providing an infrastructure and facilitation to students learning computer programming. A research model is adopted linking various motivating factors, self-efficacy, as well as the effect due to the e-learning system. Some factors are found to be notably more motivating, namely, ‘individual attitude and expectation’, ‘clear direction’, and ‘reward and recognition’. The results also suggest that a well facilitated e-learning setting can enhance learning motivation and self-efficacy.     

Emerald: A general-purpose programming language

Emerald is a general-purpose language with aspects of traditional object-oriented languages, such as Smalltalk, and abstract data type languages, such as Modula-2 and Ada. It is strongly typed with a non-traditional object model and type system that emphasize abstract types, allow separation of typing and implementation, and provide the flexibility of polymorphism and subtyping with compile-time checking. This paper describes the Emerald language and its programming methodology. We give examples that demonstrate Emerald's features, and compare and contrast the Emerald approach to programming with the approaches used in other similar languages.     

Supporting software development through declaratively codified programming patterns

In current-day software development, programmers often use programming patterns to clarify their intents and to increase the understandability of their programs. Unfortunately, most software development environments do not adequately support the declaration and use of such patterns. To explicitly codify these patterns, we adopt a declarative meta programming approach. In this approach, we reify the structure of a (object-oriented) program in terms of logic clauses. We declare programming patterns as logic rules on top of these clauses. By querying the logic system, these rules allow us to check, enforce and search for occurrences of certain patterns in the software. As such, the programming patterns become an active part of the software development and maintenance environment.     

Causal attributions of success and failure made by undergraduate students in an introductory-level computer programming course

The purpose of this research is to identify the causal attributions of business computing students in an introductory computer programming course, in the computer science department at Notre Dame University, Louaize. Forty-five male and female undergraduates who completed the computer programming course that extended for a 13-week semester participated. Narrative interviews were conducted to obtain their perceptions. While some research confirmed that the four most responsible causes for success and failure in achievement contexts are ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck, this research shows that in its context ‘ability’ and ‘luck’ were absent, and ‘task difficulty’ and ‘effort’ were almost absent. In all, participants made 10 causal attributions that were either cultural or specific to computer programming. The 10 causal attributions are ‘learning strategy’, ‘lack of study’, ‘lack of practice’, ‘subject difficulty’, ‘lack of effort’, ‘appropriate teaching method’, ‘exam anxiety’, ‘cheating’, ‘lack of time’, and ‘unfair treatment’. All high achievers cited appropriate ‘learning strategy’.     

Balancing theEuLisp metaobject protocol

The challenge for the metaobject protocol designer is to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency, simplicity, and extensibility. It is impossible to know all desired extensions in advance; some of them will require greater functionality, while others require greater efficiency. In addition, the protocol itself must be sufficiently simple that it can be fully documented and understood by those who need to use it.This paper presents the framework of a metaobject protocol forEuLisp which provides expressiveness by a multi-leveled protocol and achieves efficiency by static semantics for predefined metaobjects and modularizing their operations. TheEuLisp module system supports global optimizations of metaobject applications. The metaobject system itself is structured into modules, taking into account the consequences for the compiler. It provides introspective operations as well as extension interfaces for various functionalities, including new inheritance, allocation, and slot access semantics.While the overall goals and functionality are close to those of Kiczaleset al. [9], the approach shows different emphases. As a result, time and space efficiency as well as robustness have been improved.This article is a revised and extended version of [4]The work of this paper was supported by the joint project APPLY, Ilog SA, the University of Bath, the British Council/DAAD ARC program, and theEuLisp working group.The joint project APPLY is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT). The partners in this project are the University of Kiel, the Fraunhofer Institute for Software Engineering and Systems Engineering (ISST), the German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD), and VW-Gedas.     

Modules,objects and distributed programming: Issues in RPC and remote object invocation

Distributed programming can be greatly simplified by language support for distributed communication, such as that provided by remote procedure call (RPC) or remote object invocation. This paper examines design and implementation issues in these systems, and focuses on the influence of the communication system on a distributed program. To make the discussion concrete, we introduce a single application as implemented in two environments: Modula-2+, an extension of Modula-2 with RPC, and Emerald, an object-based language that supports remote object invocation. We show that small differences in the implementation of the communication system can have a significant impact on how distributed applications are structured.     

Learning teamwork skills in university programming courses

University courses about computer programming usually seek to provide students not only with technical knowledge, but also with the skills required to work in real-life software projects. Nowadays, the development of software applications requires the coordinated efforts of the members of one or more teams. Therefore, it is important for software professionals to master the sort of skills that assure the success of teamwork, such as communication, leadership, negotiation, or team management. However, these abilities are difficult to teach, one of the reasons being that they require true commitment from the students. However, today students are taking a more and more passive role in their own education, two of the more evident consequences being the increase in dropout rates and the decrease in marks obtained in exams. The NUCLEO e-learning framework has been designed to promote the effective acquisition of teamwork skills and, at the same time, to promote the more active participation of the students in their own learning process. NUCLEO adopts a socio-constructivist pedagogical approach that pursues the development of communities of practice for Problem Based Learning. Our research has rooted the design decisions of NUCLEO in the analysis of its socio-cultural environment with Activity Theory, which considers conflicts within groups as the impetus of their evolution and the forges of their environments. This paper presents the analysis of the main features of NUCLEO according to Activity Theory, as well as the experimental results obtained with the framework in three different case studies in university courses.     

Decision tables for general-purpose scientific programming

Decision tables are shown, by example, to be a viable alternative to conventional algorithmic languages for general-purpose scientific programming.     

面向对象的可重用库管理系统

研究软件的可重用技术是提高软件生产率、解决软件危机的良好途径。好的重用技术可以带来高可靠。高性能、高质量和高效率的软件新系统。重用是支持软件工程新范型的基础前提。文章介绍了一种支持基于重用的、开放的、不依赖于具体领域的可重用部件管理系统。     

面向对象程序设计教改探索

面向对象程序设计已成为计算机学科特别是软件学科的一个重要知识领域,是学科知识体系的基础。本文概述了面向对象程序设计课程在我院的发展历程,详细分析了该课程在教学内容、教学方法、教学手段以及实践教学方面的改革和实践。     

VB教学中“面向对象”思维的教学方法研究

《Visual Basic程序设计》作为计算机基础教育重要课程,其主要的目的是培养学员具备基本的简单编程能力。本文分析并讨论了VB编程有效的、快速的教学方法,使学员掌握＂面向对象＂程序设计的教学方法和技巧。     

Temporal disjunctive logic programming

In this paper we introduce the logic programming languageDisjunctive Chronolog which combines the programming paradigms of temporal and disjunctive logic programming. Disjunctive Chronolog is capable of expressing dynamic behaviour as well as uncertainty, two notions that are very common in a variety of real systems. We present the minimal temporal model semantics and the fixpoint semantics for the new programming language and demonstrate their equivalence. We also show how proof procedures developed for disjunctive logic programs can be easily extended to apply to Disjunctive Chronolog programs. Manolis Gergatsoulis, Ph.D.: He received his B.Sc. in Physics in 1983, the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in 1986 and 1995 respectively all from the University of Athens, Greece. Since 1996 he is a Research Associate in the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR ‘Demokritos’, Athens. His research interests include logic and temporal programming, program transformations and synthesis, as well as theory of programming languages. Panagiotis Rondogiannis, Ph.D.: He received his B.Sc. from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece, in 1989, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada, in 1991 and 1994 respectively. From 1995 to 1996 he served in the Greek army. From 1996 to 1997 he was a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, Greece, and since 1997 he is a Lecturer in the same Department. In January 2000 he was elected Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Athens. His research interests include functional, logic and temporal programming, as well as theory of programming languages. Themis Panayiotopoulos, Ph.D.: He received his Diploma on Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Technical Univesity of Athens, in 1984, and his Ph.D. on Artificial Intelligence from the above mentioned department in 1989. From 1991 to 1994 he was a visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece and a Research Associate at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of “Democritos” National Research Center. Since 1995 he is an Assistant Prof. at the Department of Computer Science, University of Piraeus. His research interests include temporal programming, logic programming, expert systems and intelligent agent architectures.     

项目教学法在面向对象程序设计课程教学中的应用

面向对象程序设计是高校计算机类专业大学生的必修课。本文结合本科教学实际,针对目前该门课程教学中存在的问题,提出项目教学法在教学中的应用,并从准备到实施的各个环节对项目教学法进行论述,同时对项目教学法和传统教学法进行分析比较。     

High-level abstractions for message-passing parallel programming

Large-scale scientific and engineering computation problems are usually complex and consequently the development of parallel programs for solving these problems is a difficult task. In this paper, we describe the graph-oriented programming (GOP) model and environment for building and evaluating parallel applications. The GOP model provides higher level abstractions for message-passing parallel programming and the software environment offers tools which can ease programmers for parallelizing, writing, and deploying scientific and engineering computing applications. We discuss the motivations and various issues in developing the model and the software environment, present the design of the system architecture and the components, and describe the evaluation of the environment implemented on top of MPI with a sample parallel scientific application program. With the support of the high-level abstractions provided by the proposed GOP environment, programming of parallel applications on various parallel architectures can be greatly simplified.     

Evolution program for nonlinear goal programming

Goal programming (GP) is one of powerful techniques for solving multi-objective optimization and has been applied to various real-life problems. This paper presents an evolution program for solving nonlinear goal programming problems.     

Higher-order communications for concurrent programming

In Pettorossi and Skowron (1983) a recursive-equations language is introduced. Its operational semantics is specified by means of computing agents which communicate and exchange messages. Those communications are, so to speak, zero-order, in the sense that the exchanged messages are values of a data structure, possibly defined by the programmer.

In this paper we extend that approach and we consider also ‘higher-order’ communications by allowing the exchange of agents behaviours, i.e. sets of computations, among computing agents. This extension leads to a new programming methodology which makes use of proofs of computing agents behaviours and their related strategies.     

程控SPWM电路的设计方法

介绍了一种基于单片机控制的三相SPWM发生器，采用了SA4828芯片，具有电路结构简单，全数字控制，不占用微机资源等优点，给出了接口的硬件电路和程控参数。     

Factors affecting microcomputer use and programming ability of secondary school children

Abstract  A survey was conducted in Hertfordshire to provide information about microcomputer use both in school and at home. All schools were found to possess microcomputers but only a limited number of pupils reported using the machines. The extent and type of use was found to be affected by gender, access to a home computer, experience, and competence. The survey included a measure of programming competence and factors that influenced this were investigated. Able programmers were frequently found to be male and to have access to home computers.     

Neural network technique for fuzzy multiobjective linear programming

Neural Network(NN) is well-known as one of powerful computing tools to solve optimization problems. Due to the massive computing unit-neurons and parallel mechanism of neural network approach we can solve the large-scale problem efficiently and optimal solution can be gotten. In this paper, we intoroduce improvement of the two-phase approach for solving fuzzy multiobjectve linear programming problem with both fuzzy objectives and constraints and we propose a new neural network technique for solving fuzzy multiobjective linear programming problems. The procedure and efficiency of this approach are shown with numerical simulations.