Motivation : Enrollments in Brazilian computing degrees are at an all-time high, but graduation numbers have not increased at the same rate. Moreover, enrollment growth has mainly attracted male students, steadily expanding the gender gap in Brazilian computing programs. Such high attrition rates have a great economic impact and may disproportionately affect women and students of color. Previous works investigated reasons for student drop-out and retention in specific courses or barriers to entrance in computing programs in narrower contexts or in a single institution. Objectives : We investigate potential actionable factors for intent to drop out in computing programs and what factors might lead students to remain in a computing program in several Brazilian institutions. We investigated how such factors may be affected by students’ race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Method : We analyzed Likert-style answers from an online survey with 3,193 students currently enrolled in Brazilian computing programs. Results : The results show that students value salary/job-related factors as the most important factors to potentially remain in a computing program. The excess of theoretical courses and the difficulty of programming and mathematics courses are the top-ranked factors by students to potentially abandon a computing degree. However, while there is little effect of gender, race/ethnicity, or socioeconomic status in retention factors, potential drop out factors such as a the fact that it is a male-dominated field, harassment, and the difficulty of courses were rated as more important by women. Also, costs and the difficulty of courses are relevant factors for the intent to drop out when analyzing students’ race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Discussion : We explore the implications of our findings for Computing programs, particularly (but not restricted to) the Brazilian context. We conjecture reasons for such students’ perspectives regarding intent to drop out and retention factors and provide recommendations of actions for instructional designers, curriculum developers, and other key stakeholders to address issues related to gender, students’ wellness, perceived authenticity of courses, and other relevant factors. Since we only observed small interactions between race/ethnicity and retention and intent to drop out factors, which may indicate a lack of sensitivity from the instrument, we present suggestions to address such limitations in future work.

Computational Thinking (CT) is a set of thinking processes used by computer scientists to formulate problems and describe solutions. In recent years, CT has been largely explored by the Computing Education community. Due to its potential to contribute to problem solving and analytical thinking, CT could also be a relevant subject in K-12 education. For such, there is a need to qualify educators in CT. In this paper, we describe our experience in a large-scale course on Computational Thinking for pre-service teachers. Our goal is to qualify pre-service teachers in CT, both in the comprehension of its definition and how it can be incorporated in classroom. Our experience indicates that the participants had a positive awareness of CT concepts, as well as an adequate understanding of the pedagogical approaches to teach the subject. They also developed positive attitudes towards the field of Computer Science.

This paper explores a survey instrument on Computational Thinking (CT) and attitudes towards Computing for educational purposes. Given the well-known skills demanded for the 21st century, CT needs to be known in the teacher community. One crucial aspect in this regard is the perceptions that students hold on the subject as well as on Computing in general. Various studies have been carried out to measure students' attitudes towards Computing. However, assessing the understanding of CT and Computing attitudes in undergraduate education, and particularly in teacher education, has not been fully explored yet. Most current instruments are either not aimed at educators or not designed to cover elements related to both CT and Computing. In this work, our goal was to evaluate a survey instrument on perceptions of CT and attitudes towards Computing for undergraduate students. Our evaluation focused on verifying whether the instrument could grasp the aspects involved in five different intended constructs: 1) understanding of CT, 2) application of CT in classroom, 3) confidence to learn Computing, 4) interest for Computing and 5) perception of Computing usefulness. After applying the instrument with 2,290 undergraduate students, we computed its reliability and used confirmatory factor analysis results to measure its validity. Results showed evidence that the instrument is both reliable and valid to measure impressions of CT and Computing attitudes in an educational context.

Well-written code (which meets standards, conventions, and quality specifications) is often associated with the programmer's experience, which is why companies have been looking for increasingly qualified professionals. Codes at odds with these standards tend to be complex and poorly written and are generally difficult to understand. Consequently, the activities inherent to it become costly. Although well defined and consolidated in the industry, the concepts of code quality taught in the academy are insufficient to enable students to meet market expectations. Research indicates that graduates do not feel prepared to enter the labor market, facing difficulties when competing for the best job opportunities. This difficulty highlights a gap between industry and academia. Researchers have identified the gap and have proposed improvements to the teaching-learning process based on using the concepts and tools widely used in the software industry in an academic environment. When analyzing educational institutions' programming disciplines, it is possible to notice a mismatch between programming disciplines and code quality disciplines. In this scenario, this project aims to propose improvements on how knowledge of programming and quality is evolved, proposing an approach that uses software quality as a subsidy for teaching programming, providing the teacher with guidelines for teaching programming focusing on internal quality source code. We idealized an innovative practice that brought programming, usually focused on the execution of algorithms, within the teaching of code quality, focused on software engineering principles. The use of code inspection tools allowed direct teaching according to the class's needs, introducing a guided content-based internal quality teaching in programming disciplines without generating extra work for the teacher. In addition to the improvements for the teacher, we are convinced that from the student's perspective, we were able to motivate them to learn to program not only concerned with the execution results but also how the solution is developed.

Computer Science teaching materials are biased towards concepts and theoretical aspects. One may consider it difficult to relate concepts to concrete problems. Consequently, it increases the chances of a student not recognizing the relevance of the subject, becoming unmotivated and unprepared to solve practical problems or coping with workplace needs after college. This paper shows the use of social media data as an alternative to minimize the skill gap between what the student learns in college and the skills required in the workplace. The proposed strategy consists of extracting topics from Stack Overflow questions to identify concepts generally unknown or misunderstood and concepts that their practical application represents a challenge. The concepts covered in Stack Overflow questions provide strong cues about how professors and instructors can improve teaching material with useful content for their students, as well as increase their motivation -- since the teaching material becomes clearly related to practical issues in Computer Science. We show, by an example, how to use the proposed strategy to improve teaching material from the generated topics. Also, we demonstrate that the application of topic modeling in Stack Overflow content is promising as a professor support tool to enhance teaching material relevance in Computer Science courses and diminish the college-workplace skill gap.

Software Quality Assurance is a sub-process that ensures that developed software meets and complies with defined or standardized quality specifications. Focusing on source code, there are characteristics that can be used to evaluate the quality. Introductory courses must encourage freshmen students to improve internal quality of their source code, but only as sophomore they have contact with Software Engineering concepts, including Quality Assurance. In this paper we present a tool to source code quality evaluation aimed at supporting students to improve their source code and, consequently, their programming skills. The proposed tool uses quality reports (available to professional environment integrate with software repositories) to analyze students' source code and provide a feedback about the student coding. The proposed tool run locally, with few computational resources. In addition, we proposed the methodology to use the proposed tool: it consists of challenging students to perform a set of maintenance tasks in a controlled environment. We prepared a source code by introducing common defects, what decreases the quality of source code, and ask to students to perform maintenance tasks in order to both eliminate the introduced defects and introduce new features. After each modification, the students must evaluate their code using the proposed tool to obtain a feedback about quality of source code. To evaluate the approach and the tool, we created a survey and applied to students and the teacher. As a result, we show the benefits of using the proposed tool to both teachers and students perspectives. The results are positive to enhance the teaching-learning Software Quality Assurance to Software Engineering students.

Theoretical Computer Science area (TCS) stands out by being an important study field, and it is composed by Formal Languages and Automata Theory (FLA), Computer Science Theory (CST), and Theory of Compilers (TC). This area is responsible for introducing the beginnings of the Computer Science through formalisms - which represent a set of methods, techniques, or rules that describe the solution to a problem with restrictions - and it has a substantial impact on the student's knowledge. Computer science theory is based on the understanding of computability and techniques to solve challenges, and to improve the teaching-learning process used to introduce these concepts we proposed a Combined Methodology for Theoretical Computing (CMTC). Our methodology is based on formalism development to ground the knowledge acquired during classes of FLA, CST, and TC, where students are introduced to Theoretical Computing during one year and a half. In each course, we applied the same methodology where each student used data structures, computer graphics, and algorithms to solve problems. We address this methodology to understand how much the incomprehension of formalisms is influenced by new concepts and its abstractions. Against this background, we demonstrate that the that CMTC has the aim to build knowledge and make the new concepts and formalisms concrete. Our results are based on statistical analysis from students' grades, where we could observe among other results, the correlation between the practical activities and the conceptual knowledge.

Project management is an essential activity across several areas, including Software Engineering. Through good management it is possible to achieve deadlines, budgets goals and mainly delivering a product that meets customer expectations. Project management activity encompasses: measurement and metrics; estimation; risk analysis; schedules; tracking and control. Considering the importance of managing projects, it is necessary that courses related to Information Technology and Computer Science present to students concepts, techniques and methodology necessary to cover all project management activities. Software project management courses aim at preparing students to apply management techniques required to plan, organize, monitor and control software projects. In a nutshell, software project management focuses on process, problem and people. In this paper we proposed an approach to teaching and learning of software project management using practical activities. The intention of this work is to provide the experience of applying theoretical concepts in practical activities. The teaching and learning approach, applied since 2006 in a Computer Science course, is based on teamwork. Each team is divided into groups assuming different roles of software process development. We have set four groups, each one assuming a different role (manager; software quality assurance; analyst and designer; programmer). The team must be conducted across the software process by its manager. We use four projects, each group is in charge of managing a different project. In this paper we present the proposed approach (based on hands on activities for project management); we summarize the lessons learned by applying the approach since 2006; we present a qualitative analysis from data collect along the application.

Digital Image Processing (DIP) consists of a set of techniques to acquire, represent and transform digital images. Through these techniques, it is possible to extract and identify information of images and improve the visual quality by facilitating human perception and interpretation by computer systems. However, the Digital Image Processing teaching is hindered by the complexity of implementation of many techniques, on several occasions is not possible that student visualize the results of DIP techniques when are discussed during the course. This paper presents an experiment over a web platform to support the teaching of digital image processing. The goal of this platform is not replace coding techniques, but allow rapid visualization and experimentation of studied methods, without be necessary to install software or previous knowledge of a specific programming language.

Formal languages and automata (FLA) theory have fundamental relevance to the base of knowledge in the computer science area, especially focusing on scientific education. Usually presented by a discipline, the teaching-learning process of FLA is characterized by the high level of abstraction, and it is considered difficult due to the complexity of language formalisms. As support for the learning process, tools have been used to simulate language formalisms. However, the simulation is not enough to reinforce the construction of an abstract concept. In this paper, we present an FLA teaching-learning methodology based on the development of simulators as an approach to clarify the formalism for the students. Through developing their simulators, students are exposed to the data structure and algorithms to handle the formalism. Consequently, students have the opportunity to make the concept concrete.

Data synchronization is a process of establishing equivalence among two data collections. It is essential to distribute databases and several techniques have been implemented in Database Management Systems (DBMS), but it is not a feature for free use versions. Focusing on mobile computing, applications that perform data synchronization have become increasingly popular. However, due to lack of internet connection, synchronization process requires specific features to take place in an asynchrony way. The MySQLite Sync middleware, presented in this paper, perform data synchronization among databases stored in mobile devices and DBMS. To validate our proposal we adopted metrics based on time and number of primary and foreign keys mapped after synchronization, in order to maintain data integrity. The results obtained are presented and discussed showing positive contributions.

The Data Structure discipline consists on studying data organization in computer memory, primary and secondary ones. Data structures are organized using conceptual and behavioral issues that require high degree of abstract representation. It has been observed significant difficulty, by students, to understand the abstract concepts related, which is observed during practical tasks. In fact, practical tasks are essential to consolidate knowledge about data structures, but the students need support to understand the concepts before practical tasks. There are several works in literature showing tools to support conceptual and behavior comprehension, each one with specific features. However, the tools by themselves are not enough, dealing with specific data structure, with severe constraint. In literature, some tools are presented using case studies specific to the data structures supported. And we observed that the tools are presented focusing on their functionalities (the case studies are designed to explore such functionalities). Also, we observed the lack of a methodological approach to incorporate tools in a learning process effectively. In this scenario, we address the use of technological support to teaching-learning process. We propose a methodology based on constructionism, in which students, tasks (home works) and tools are coordinated by a teacher in favor of knowledge construction. In order to present our methodology, we use a learning tool, named CADILAG, developed using visual resources to support students understand data structures concepts. We applied the methodology proposed for two years. The positive results are observed in students grades and their evaluation. Also, according to the teacher, the students have shown interest and motivation.

The development of large-scale distributed virtual environments deals with restrictions imposed by the infrastructure of communication systems. The scalability in those systems is an important issue to consider on designing and shows higher complexity, as the resources managed by the system increases. AVDNet - an architecture for scalable distributed virtual environments presented in a previous work - helps to reduce the amount of packets sent over the communication network. Besides, the computational processing on rendering is also reduced by using AVDNet, since the virtual environments is created using regions that separate spatially the environment. However, the AVDNet has restrictions on dealing with bandwidth management and the choice of servers, considering their availability. In this paper we present an analysis of scalability using the application layer anycast. To conduct this analysis we use the AnyAVDNet, a framework that implements the dynamic load distribution among servers of AVDNet regions. In addition, we show the metrics and the results.

Most of architectures proposed for developing distributed virtual environment (DVE) allow limited number of users. To support the development of applications using the Internet infrastructure, with hundred or, perhaps, thousands users logged simultaneously on DVE, several techniques for managing resources, such as bandwidth and capability of processing, must be implemented. The strategy presented in this paper combines methods to attain the scalability required, in special the multicast protocol at application level.