As technological advancements continue to transform societal expectations, educational frameworks are increasingly focusing on cultivating ethically conscious professionals. This paper explores the philosophical distinctions between the integration of ethics within Computer Science and Engineering education, particularly considering the evolving demands of Industry 5.0. It begins with an analysis of official guidelines and accreditation documents to examine how the emphasis on ethics education has shifted over time and how these changes manifest differently across the two disciplines. Subsequently, it evaluates the implementation of ethics within current curricula at South African universities, specifically comparing Computer Science and Engineering programs. The analysis reveals that Computer Science tends to embed ethical considerations within its technical courses, whereas Engineering typically treats ethics as a discrete competency that is separately assessed. Crossdisciplinary collaboration and curriculum design will be beneficial to both programs. The study concludes by recommending that Engineering programs integrate ethical units across all modules to prevent the perception that ethics is detached from routine professional activities. Conversely, Computer Science programs would benefit from more stringent regulation and accreditation to ensure that ethical guidelines are systematically enforced.

Hackathons can be defined as platforms for fostering the innovation of small, focused teams who come together to collaborate in solving a particular problem built through a new or existing technology. A community-based hackathon for problem identification was explored in a bid to advance Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) on ending poverty, attaining equitable quality education and the promotion of sustained inclusive and sustainable growth as articulated in, “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” by the United Nations continue to be inspire impactful research on how to attain these by the target year 2030. The aim of the study was to identify the problems faced by local communities; craft proposed solutions to create a knowledge base which could be used as input for the capstone projects in the year 2023 at university X. This study used focus groups within the hackathons to gather data from three communities in the KZN, GP and WC provinces of South Africa as part of its effort to understand the application domain and associated requirements. In the paper we present the results of the hackathons. The study found that the attaining of sustainability in communities through poverty eradication and the promotion of sustained inclusive and sustainable growth can only be achieved if communities sit at the centre of initiatives that seek to improve the lives of ordinary community members. Secondly the study showed the important role communities can play in their development and the power of collaboration between the local community and the universities in solving societal problems. The study also displayed the clear benefits of communities of practice and presents a foundation to sustainable development projects in the community. The study also found that communities are not short of brilliance and with some assistance they can identify and classify their problems as well as develop paper prototypes in a bid to solve the identified problems. The researchers conclude that future collaboration between the local communities and universities could be a game changer for the inclusion of real-life challenges for an authentic student learning experience.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had to change to online teaching and learning at short notice. This presented a number of challenges to both lecturers and students. One of the challenges for lecturers is a lack of continuous feedback from students. In a traditional class, the lecturer gets non-verbal feedback from students, for example nodding heads, and verbal feedback, for example questions and comments. It is difficult to lecture without these feedback mechanisms. To overcome this challenge, a weekly rating system was implemented to provide students with the opportunity to give continuous, anonymous feedback to the lecturer.

The use of educational technology which can be defined as the facilitation of teaching and learning by the creation and usage of technological processes and resources has seen a significant increase in higher education institutions. The effectiveness of the educational technology is closely linked to its adoption rate. In this article the researchers examine the lack of adoption of education technology on an instant student, lecturer feedback system. A Web Application is built to track interactions between students and the supervisor during the Capstone project as well as provide instant regular feedback to lecturers after every class conducted. The paper zooms in on adoption rates as well as the system’s fitness for purpose and concludes by recommending a framework for adoption.

Various engineering education interventions are proposed to enhance the teaching and learning experience and increase positive outcomes. The effectiveness of these interventions are tested using a number of different methods, for example questionnaires and pre- and post testing. These interventions are focused on students, although marketing of the effectiveness of these interventions to increase adoption are aimed at faculty. This paper examines a number of case studies based on different types of interventions. The focus is on student adoption rates if these interventions are optional or if the consequences of not participating is negligibly small. The adoption patterns are also studied to assist faculty in increasing adoption rates.

This paper reviews recent attempts by researchers at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to increase the level of student engagement in a final year capstone project by allowing for a greater level of autonomy in project selection and assignment. The paper introduces the context, followed by a justification from current literature, an introduction to the approach and finally a summary of the outcomes obtained by the project. In this study an authentic learning approach was followed which allowed students to propose and tender for capstone projects in a four-year engineering programme, and following a period of tender also give active input into the selection of tenders based on their personal knowledge and experience. From this process, a preference list was obtained from both students and faculty of their opinions of the best way assignments could be allocated followed by applying the Gale-Shapley algorithm to select the optimal assignment of projects to students. It is hoped that this study will inspire other educators in similar situations to consider handing over some measure of control to students during their undergraduate studies in engineering to increase the level of responsibility and thoughtful reflection experienced by students before they enter the profession.

This paper reviews recent attempts by researchers at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to increase the level of interaction between students, faculty and industry stakeholders by creating an alternate reality game (ARG) which is run during student presentations of Electrical Engineering capstone project work. The paper introduces the context, followed by a justification from current literature, the approach followed and finally a summary of the outcomes obtained by the project. Inspiration is taken from the work done by McGonigal and the MAGELLAN consortium on creating ARGs within an educational context. The Jen ratio is used as a measure of the social well-being of the space the game is played in and interactions between different players are used as the main gauge of success. Results from the first successful implementation of the game are presented and discussed. It is hoped that this study will inspire other educators in similar situations to consider playful design when interacting with large numbers of people inside and outside of the classroom.

A serious game called "Codebreakers" was developed and designed for a fourth year Telecommunications module at the University of Johannesburg. The goal of the game was to assist students to prepare for tests. The game was played for the first time in 2017 and received positive feedback. During a collaborative design session with students, educational specialists, developers and the lecturer, it emerged that students would also gain from a serious game that not only allows them to prepare for tests, but also to explore and understand the content from the start. A linear and narrative driven serious games called "EnigmAI" was designed and developed with this goal in mind. This paper explores the design and development of the new game, based on the experience gained from the previous game and from collaborative design sessions.

Capstone projects are projects that engineering students undertake in their final year of study. The capstone project gives the student the opportunity to showcase what she has learned during her studies, and gives the academic study leader the opportunity to test important skills necessary to be an engineer. In this project, interactive, serious games for children are proposed as capstone projects for electrical and electronic engineering final year students. Students created an electronic device that would be attached to a child, record motion and then transmit that data to a computer game where the motion gets transformed into appropriate game interaction. The child thus plays the game by moving around. The aim of the game is to encourage the child to be an active participant and, in some cases, may also be used for therapeutic intervention. In addition to meeting the required exit level outcomes and contributing to the growth of graduate attributes, these students' experiences were enhanced by being exposed to problems outside the realm of engineering, being confronted by ethical and usability issues, being exposed to multi-disciplinary interactions and an opportunity to use their engineering ability in different engineering fields. This paper describes the experiences of the study leaders and students in using a project of this nature in 2017.

Permutation codes are advantageous due to their favourable symbol diversity properties and are applied in flash memories combined with rank modulation. Codebooks traditionally consist of permutations with specific distance properties. A class of permutation codes was presented where a codeword consists of a sequence or concatenation of permutations, rather than a single permutation. These codebooks were constructed to correct substitution or deletion errors. In this paper, permutations are concatenated to form codewords with the goal of detecting and correcting adjacent transposition errors. An outer code is used to detect erroneous permutations in the codeword, using additional parity permutations. The symbol diversity of permutation codes is preserved and codebooks with higher cardinalities are constructed which result in better code rates.

A new class of permutation codes is presented where, instead of considering one permutation as a codeword, codewords consist of a sequence of permutations. The advantage of using permutations, i.e. their favourable symbol diversity properties, is preserved. Additionally, using sequences of permutations as codewords, code rates close to the optimum rate can be achieved. Firstly, the complete set of permutations is divided into subsets by using set partitioning. Binary data is then mapped to permutations from these subsets. These permutations, together with a parity permutation, will form the codeword. Two constructions will be presented: one capable of detecting and correcting substitution errors and the other capable of detecting and correcting either substitution or deletion errors.