The use of generative AI (genAI) in higher education is rapidly evolving, provoking both optimism and concern among educators. While some students embrace genAI tools as learning aids, others, including many educators, remain cautious about their implications for critical thinking and academic integrity. Accepting that genAI is readily available and banning its use is not feasible, we explore how it might be integrated meaningfully into pedagogy through the lens of Transformative Learning Theory (TLT). This study investigates how genAI tools influence student learning in an IT Forensics course using diverging assessments, a form of assessment-as-learning where students receive the same authentic tasks but unique data inputs. We examine three research questions addressing genAI's impact on learning strategies, its role in supporting assessment-as-learning tasks, and how it fosters critical reflection and transformation in student learning. Drawing on interviews with 14 students, our findings suggest that, when scaffolded appropriately, genAI use within diverging assessments can catalyze transformative learning by provoking disorienting dilemmas, encouraging reflection, and reshaping problem-solving approaches. Finally, implications for teaching practice and assessment design are discussed.

Diverging assessment maintains a common question set for all students but varies the input data so that each student has a unique problem to solve. It is an approach in student assessment that offers a unique and authentic learning experience. Although such assessments have been implemented in computing courses, their effectiveness and students' perceptions in different contexts remain unexplored. In this paper, we investigate student perspectives on diverging assessment. We surveyed students in four courses across three different universities. Each surveyed student was enrolled in one of the four courses on networking, operation systems, digital forensics or ethical hacking. Each course featured at least one diverging assessment. The students' overall perceptions about diverging assessments and three different aspects of diverging assessment, namely authenticity, assessment-as-learning, and academic integrity, are surveyed, reported, and analyzed.

Generative AI (GenAI) presents societal and ethical challenges related to equity, academic integrity, bias, and data provenance. This working group will consider the ethical and societal impacts of GenAI in higher computing education. In this paper, we outline the goals, methodology and expected deliverables of the working group. In particular, we will carry out a systematic literature review to address a wide set of issues and topics covering the rapidly emerging technology of GenAI from the perspective of its ethical and social impacts, we will provide an evaluation of university policies on the adoption and guidelines for use of GenAI for computing education and develop a framework to outline the ethical and societal impacts of GenAI in computing education. This work synthesizes existing research and considers the implications for educational and professional codes of ethics.

The application of mastery learning, where students progress through their learning in a self-paced manner until they have mastered specific concepts, is considered appealing for teaching introductory programming courses. Despite its growing popularity in computing and its extensive use in other disciplines, there is no overview of the design of courses that use mastery learning. In this position paper, we present an overview of five mastery learning models and discuss examples of how these can be applied in practice, both in foundational programming as well as more advanced courses. Our analysis focuses on the student progression through the course, the assessment structure, and the support for self-paced learning, including for struggling students. This work provides a greater understanding of mastery learning and its application in a computing education context.

In this experience paper, we present ALAN, a framework to automate the generation of authentic assessment tasks in networking courses (NC). Using ALAN, all students in a cohort complete a set of assessment tasks generated from the same skeleton, with each student having their own parameters as input. The way we run ALAN assessments fosters students' self-regulation and peer learning and activates students' engagement in learning through assessment. We present three different ALAN assessments. We finally report on student perceptions and satisfaction and reflect on our experience.

In this experience paper, we introduce the concept of 'diverging assessments', process-based assessments designed so that they become unique for each student while all students see a common skeleton. We present experiences with diverging assessments in the contexts of computer networks, operating systems, ethical hacking, and software development. All the given examples allow the use of generative-AI-based tools, are authentic, and are designed to generate learning opportunities that foster students' meta-cognition. Finally, we reflect upon these experiences in five different courses across four universities, showing how diverging assessments enhance students' learning while respecting academic integrity.

Much of the recent work investigating large language models and AI Code Generation tools in computing education has focused on assessing their capabilities for solving typical programming problems and for generating resources such as code explanations and exercises. If progress is to be made toward the inevitable lasting pedagogical change, there is a need for research that explores the instructor voice, seeking to understand how instructors with a range of experiences plan to adapt. In this paper, we report the results of an interview study involving 12 instructors from Australia, Finland and New Zealand, in which we investigate educators' current practices, concerns, and planned adaptations relating to these tools. Through this empirical study, our goal is to prompt dialogue between researchers and educators to inform new pedagogical strategies in response to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI code generation tools.

Research into the relationship between learning computing and students' attitudes, beliefs, and emotions often builds on theoretical frameworks from the social sciences in order to understand how these factors influence, for example, students' motivation, study practices, and learning results. In this paper we explore the computing education research literature to identify new theoretical constructs that have emerged from this research. We focus on empirical work in programming education that extends or adapts theories or instruments from the social sciences or that independently develops theories specific to programming. From an initial data set of more than 3800 papers published in the years 2010--2019, we identify 50 papers that present a range of domain-specific theoretical constructs addressing emotions, affect, beliefs, attitudes, and self-efficacy. They include 11 validated instruments and a number of statistical models, but also grounded theories and pedagogical models. We summarize the main results of many of these constructs and provide references for all of them. We also investigate how these constructs have informed further research by analysing over 850 papers that cite these 50 papers. We categorize the ways that theories can inform further research, and give examples of papers in each of these categories. Our findings indicate that among these categories, instruments have been most widely used in further research, thus affirming their value in the field.

Since 1996 the ITiCSE conference has provided a forum for academics with an interest in computing education scholarship and research. ITiCSE is often thought of as the European counterpart to northern America's SIGCSE Technical Symposium. Yet from its very beginning, ITiCSE has differed substantially from the Symposium. In addition to the many participants from Europe and North America, ITiCSE has also always hosted many participants from Australia and New Zealand, expanding its international perspective. Why is this? What is the appeal of ITiCSE to its participants, and what do its participants bring to ITiCSE? More specifically, what do Australians and New Zealanders bring to and take from the conference? Are there opportunities to involve computing educators from other regions? Judy Sheard and Simon will explore these questions and provide their perspectives. In this 25th year of ITiCSE, they will also speculate about the future of the conference and of the future role of Australia and New Zealand -- especially in light of the disruption in 2020.

When student programs are compared for similarity, certain segments of code are always sure to be similar. Some of these segments are boilerplate code -- public static void main String [] args and the like -- and some will be code that was provided to students as part of the assessment specification. The purpose of this working group is to explore what other code is expected to be reasonably common in student assessments, and should therefore be excluded from similarity checking. The answers will clearly vary with programming language, and perhaps with level of assessment item. Working group members will collect assessment submissions from their own or their colleagues' students, and it is hoped that these submissions will together encompass a wide variety of assessment tasks in a wide variety of programming languages. The working group aims to deliver clear guidelines as to what code can reasonably be excluded from automatic code similarity detection in various circumstances. It also aims to deliver a summary of what sort of code lecturers tend to provide for students when setting an assigned task, and why they provide that code.

This paper presents an analysis of all 1295 full papers and 129 working group reports presented and published at ITiCSE since the conference began in 1996. Working group reports are analysed separately from full papers, in recognition of the particular process by which they are created. The analysis shows that nearly 40% of ITiCSE's full papers concern programming education, and that more than half of them present work conducted in single courses. In contrast, most of the working group reports have a context that extends beyond specific topic areas, and report on work that was not conducted in any courses. About half of the full papers focus on techniques of teaching and learning or tools for teaching and learning, whereas two thirds of the working group reports focus on techniques of teaching and learning or curriculum. With both full papers and working group reports there has been a steady increase in the proportion of papers that clearly present educational research. The findings from our analysis provide valuable insights for potential authors, attendees, chairs, and the whole ITiCSE community.

In order to mature as a research field, computing education research (CER) seeks to build a better theoretical understanding of how students learn computing concepts and processes. Progress in this area depends on the development of computing-specific theories of learning to complement the general theoretical understanding of learning processes. In this paper we analyze the CER literature in three central publication venues -- ICER, ACM Transactions of Computing Education, and Computer Science Education -- over the period 2005--2015. Our findings identify new theoretical constructs of learning computing that have been published, and the research approaches that have been used in formulating these constructs. We identify 65 novel theoretical constructs in areas such as learning/understanding, learning behaviour/strategies, study choice/orientation, and performance/progression/retention. The most common research methods used to devise new constructs include grounded theory, phenomenography, and various statistical models. We further analyze how a number of these constructs, which arose in computing education, have been used in subsequent research, and present several examples to illustrate how theoretical constructs can guide and enrich further research. We discuss the implications for the whole field.

The goal of most computing education research is to effect positive change in how computing is taught and learned. Statistical techniques are one important tool for achieving this goal. In this paper we report on an analysis of ICER papers that use inferential statistics. We present the most commonly used techniques; an overview of the techniques the ICER community has used over its first 14 years of papers, grouped according to the purpose of the technique; and a detailed analysis of three of the most commonly used techniques (t-test, chi-squared test, and Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon). We identify common flaws in reporting and give examples of papers where statistics are reported well. In sum, the paper draws a picture of the use of inferential statistics by the ICER community. This picture is intended to help orient researchers who are new to the use of statistics in computing education research and to encourage reflection by the ICER community on how it uses statistics and how it can improve that use.

We present an analysis of the visual portrayals of data (including results) in the full papers and working group reports of ITiCSE from 2013 to 2018. We find that tables are the most common visual portrayal of data in these publications, but that a number of graphical forms are also widely used. We examine the quality of the data portrayals for tables, graphs, and images using visual quality indicators derived from the literature. Overall, our findings are not positive. We find that many papers present data in such a way that it cannot be readily interpreted. The most common problem is captions that do not adequately describe the table, figure, or image. In tables, the main issues affecting readability of numeric data are poor alignment of numbers within a column, unnecessary notations, and unwarranted precision. In graphs and images, the prevalent problem is text that is too small to be read. We conclude with guidelines for future authors to ITiCSE and other computing education venues, in the hope that we can contribute to an improvement in the quality of computing education publications.

Computing education research is built on the use of suitable methods within appropriate theoretical frameworks to provide guidance and solutions for our discipline, in a way that is rigorous and repeatable. However, the scale of theory covered extends well beyond the CS discipline and includes educational theory, behavioural psychology, statistics, economics, and game theory, among others. A computing education researcher's journey towards appropriate and discipline relevant theory can be challenging and, when a researcher has learned one area of theory, it can be easy to return to familiar theory, as it may not be clear what the next step could be. The periodic table is a visual arrangement of the elements to group like with like, providing insight into how families of elements will react. Could we do the same with learning theories located in the domain of computer science education, and would it be useful? The working group will identify and survey existing literature on relationships between key areas of theory in computing education, identify ways of organising these research areas to show how knowledge of one could assist another, and produce initial graphical representations of theory and their relationship groupings to assist researchers in understanding how computing theory is currently used in the discipline and what theories might become of interest.

Educational environments in higher education Information Technology (IT) courses typically involve the use of multiple technologies. Such technology-rich learning and teaching environments (TRLTEs) can enhance a student’s learning experiences and support learning in different settings (e.g., in-class and out-of-class, individual and group learning) and promote flexibility in learning in terms of time, space and access to learning resources. However, these can be complex teaching environments for educators to manage. A challenge for educators is to ensure that learning across multiple technologies and contexts happens seamlessly. Seamless learning is a notion whereby students transition smoothly from one learning setting to another, typically aided by technology. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of IT educators’ experiences of a TRLTE. Semi-structured interviews were used to elicit IT educators’ views of enablers and barriers to learning seamlessly. Data were analyzed using a thematic analysis technique. The findings revealed several issues in facilitating learning in a TRLTE and IT educators used various technologies to bridge the seams in their students’ learning. We discuss the findings and the implications for providing a seamless learning experience.

A broad review of research on the teaching and learning of programming was conducted by Robins et al. in 2003. Since this work there have been several reviews of research concerned with the teaching and learning of programming, in particular introductory programming. However, these reviews have focused on highly specific aspects, such as student misconceptions, teaching approaches, program comprehension, potentially seminal papers, research methods applied, automated feedback for exercises, competency-enhancing games, and program visualisation. While these aspects encompass a wide range of issues, they do not cover the full scope of research into novice programming. Some notable areas that have not been reviewed are assessment, academic integrity, and novice student attitudes to programming. There does not appear to have been a comprehensive review of research into introductory programming since that of Robins et al. It is therefore timely to conduct and present such a review in order to gain an understanding of the research focuses, to highlight advances in knowledge since 2003, and to indicate possible future directions for research. The working group will conduct a systematic literature review based on the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. This research project is well suited to an ITiCSE working group as the synthesis and discussion of the literature will benefit from input from a variety of researchers drawn from different backgrounds and countries.

Conferences such as ITiCSE have recently seen an increase in the number of papers presenting empirical research in computing education. While empirical research need not be quantitative, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of papers that present some level of statistical analysis to support their arguments. This poster introduces a project that is exploring how -- and how well -- statistics are used and reported in computing education research.

Safeguarding academic integrity is an issue of concern to all computing academics due to high and rising levels of plagiarism and other cheating in computing courses. There have been many studies of the cheating and plagiarism practices of computing students and the factors that can influence these practices, and a variety of strategies for reducing cheating have been proposed. This national study of first-year computing programs provides insights into what strategies computing academics use to discourage or prevent their students from cheating. Having interviewed 30 academics from 25 universities we found 21 different types of strategy, which we classified into five themes: education; discouraging cheating; making cheating difficult; and empowerment. We also found that academics often employ strategies across all of these themes.

The programming education literature includes many observations that pass rates are low in introductory programming courses, but few or no comparisons of student performance across courses. This paper addresses that shortcoming. Having included a small set of identical questions in the final examinations of a number of introductory programming courses, we illustrate the use of these questions to examine the relative performance of the students both across multiple institutions and within some institutions. We also use the questions to quantify the size and overall difficulty of each exam. We find substantial differences across the courses, and venture some possible explanations of the differences. We conclude by explaining the potential benefits to instructors of using the same questions in their own exams.

Ten selected questions have been included in 13 introductory programming exams at seven institutions in five countries. The students' results on these questions, and on the exams as a whole, lead to the development of a benchmark against which the exams in other introductory programming courses can be assessed. We illustrate some potential benefits of comparing exam performance against this benchmark, and show other uses to which it can be put, for example to assess the size and the overall difficulty of an exam. We invite others to apply the benchmark to their own courses and to share the results with us.

Computer history tours are a new way to educate people about our discipline and its history. We describe the introduction of such tours and their use in curriculum enrichment, outreach, and academic community-building. These tours give historical and social context to the development of topics in the curriculum, and demonstrate to students the universality of some of the principles they learn. The city of Melbourne, Australia, serves as an illustration, but computer history tours can be run in many cities of various sizes, and we give advice on how to do this.

There is widespread concern about lack of student engagement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) courses and the influence of this on learning outcomes, retention, and the student experience overall. Lack of engagement is particularly concerning for first-year students, who are developing their study behaviours for the remainder of their degree programs. This study seeks to report on the myriad of current initiatives in Australian universities to increase ICT student engagement. This is explored for both in-class teaching innovations and the support structures with which students interface academically and administratively. The study draws upon data collected from interviews of 30 academics involved with the design and delivery of the first-year learning experience of ICT students in 25 Australian universities. Analysis of this data has provided a comprehensive overview of current initiatives to address student engagement. These covered a range of academic and non-academic aspects of the student experience. Our findings highlight the unique challenges that our first-year ICT students face and we recommend areas for further investigation.

Certain practices, such as unauthorised collaboration with other students and unreferenced copying from external sources, are generally considered in the educational context to be breaches of academic integrity. This paper explores whether there are differences between the perceptions of the acceptability of these practices in the academic context and in the professional context. From focus groups of computing academics and students, and an online survey, we find that there are indeed differences in perceptions: that many practices considered unacceptable in the academic context are considered significantly more acceptable in the professional context. This raises questions concerning the roles of summative assessment and the possibilities of authentic assessment. The paper concludes that in much of programming education there is an unbreachable rift between the goal of authentic assessment, which necessarily entails collaborative work, and the need for summative assessment of individual effort, which typically requires work in isolation. The findings of our research have implications for computing education programs, particularly in regard to preparation of students for the workforce.

We analyze the Computing Education Research (CER) literature to discover what theories, conceptual models and frameworks recent CER builds on. This gives rise to a broad understanding of the theoretical basis of CER that is useful for researchers working in that area, and has the potential to help CER develop its own identity as an independent field of study.

Student perceptions of academic integrity have been extensively researched in relation to text-based assessments, but there is rather less research relating to non-text-based assessments such as computer programs, databases, and spreadsheets. This paper reports the findings from a survey of computing students and academics to investigate perceptions of particular academic practices with regard to both essays and computing assessments. For each practice the research sought to discover whether it was perceived to constitute plagiarism or collusion and whether it was considered to be acceptable in an academic environment. While there was general agreement between academics and students regarding some practices, both groups displayed high levels of uncertainty about other practices. There was considerable variation between their attitudes to similar practices in the text and non-text environments, and between what was seen as plagiarism/collusion and perceptions of unacceptability. That is, there were practices that were perceived to be plagiarism or collusion but were considered acceptable, and others that were considered not to be plagiarism or collusion but were nevertheless thought unacceptable. These findings suggest a need for academic integrity policies and procedures specific to computing, accompanied by discipline-specific student education.

During the past two years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have created wide interest in the academic world raising both enthusiasm for new opportunities for universities and many concerns for the future of university education. The discussion has mainly appeared in non-scientific forums, such as magazine articles, columns and blogs, making it difficult to judge wider opinions within academia. To collect more rigorous data we surveyed teachers, researchers, and academic managers on their opinions and experiences of MOOCs. In this paper, we present our analysis of responses from the computer science academic community (n=137). Their feelings about MOOCs are highly mixed. Content analysis of open-ended questions revealed that the most often mentioned positive aspects included affordances of MOOCs, freedom of time and location for studying, and the possibility to experience teaching from top-level international teachers/experts. The most common negative aspects included concerns about pedagogical designs of MOOCs, assessment practices, and lack of interaction with the teacher. About half the respondents claimed they had not changed their teaching as a result of MOOCs, a small number used MOOCs as learning resources and very few were engaging with MOOCs in any significant way.

This paper reports on research that used focus groups and a national online survey of computing students at Australian universities to investigate perceptions of acceptable academic practices in writing program code for assessment. The results indicate that computing students lack a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes acceptable academic practice with regard to writing program code. They are not clear on the need to reference code taken from other sources, or on how to do so. Where code from other sources is used, or inappropriate collaboration takes place between students, there appears to be a feeling that any academic misconduct is diminished or even nullified if the students subsequently work with the code to make it their own. These findings suggest a need for the development of standards that elucidate acceptable practices for computing, combined with ongoing education of computing students.

Previous studies of assessment of programming via written examination have focused on analysis of the examination papers and the questions they contain. This paper reports the results of a study that investigated how these final exam papers are developed, how students are prepared for these exams, and what pedagogical foundations underlie the exams. The study involved interviews of 11 programming lecturers. From our analysis of the interviews, we find that most exams are based on existing formulas that are believed to work; that the lecturers tend to trust in the validity of their exams for summative assessment; and that while there is variation in the approaches taken to writing the exams, all of the exam writers take a fairly standard approach to preparing their students to sit the exam. We found little evidence of explicit references to learning theories or models, indicating that the process is based largely on intuition and experience.

This paper describes the development of a classification scheme that can be used to investigate the characteristics of introductory programming examinations. We describe the process of developing the scheme, explain its categories, and present a taste of the results of a pilot analysis of a set of CS1 exam papers. This study is part of a project that aims to investigate the nature and composition of formal examination instruments used in the summative assessment of introductory programming students, and the pedagogical intentions of the educators who construct these instruments.

Cheating in undergraduate computing courses is an ongoing and widespread concern. In this paper we report an investigation of changes over the last decade in computing students' attitudes towards cheating practices, the extent of cheating behavior, and factors which influence cheating at an Australian university. A comparative analysis of data from surveys in 2000 and 2010 of undergraduate students in a School of Information Technology found that students in 2010 considered cheating less acceptable and the practice of cheating was reportedly lower. These results are discussed in terms of measures that have been taken to address this problem.

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of research papers in computing education. While previous analysis has explored what research is being done in computing education, this project explores how that research is being done. We present our classification system, then the results of applying it to the papers from all five years of ICER. We find that this subset of computing education research has more in common with research in information systems than with that in computer science or software engineering; and that the papers published at ICER generally appear to conform to the specified ICER requirements.

This paper presents an analysis of research papers about programming education that were published in computing education conferences in the years 2005 to 2008. We employed Simon's classification scheme to identify the papers of interest from the ICER, SIGCSE, ITiCSE, ACE, Koli Calling and NACCQ conferences. Having identified the papers, we analyzed the type of data collected, whether the analysis was qualitative, quantitative, or mixed, and the aims and outcomes being reported. The greatest number of papers employed quantitative research methods, investigated the ability, aptitude, or understanding of students, and were based in single courses. The theme of the research and the type of study conducted vary across the conferences, indicating the different nature and role of each conference. Papers that investigated student learning of programming in terms of established theories or models of learning were not common, indicating an area of research that deserves more attention.

We have applied Simon's system for classifying computing education publications to all three years of papers from ICER. We describe the process of assessing the inter-rater reliability of the system and fine-tuning it along the way. Our analysis of the ICER papers confirms that ICER is a research-intensive conference. It also indicates that the research is quite narrowly focused, with the majority of the papers set in the context of programming courses. In addition we find that ICER has a high proportion of papers involving more than one institution, and high proportions of papers on the themes of ability/aptitude and theories and models of teaching and learning.

This paper explores the programming knowledge of novices using Biggs' SOLO taxonomy. It builds on previous work of Lister et al. (2006) and addresses some of the criticisms of that work. The research was conducted by studying the exam scripts for 120 introductory programming students, in which three specific questions were analyzed using the SOLO taxonomy. The study reports the following four findings: when the instruction to students used by Lister et al. - "In plain English, explain what the following segment of Java code does" - is replaced with a less ambiguous instruction, many students still provide multistructural responses; students are relatively consistent in the SOLO level of their answers; student responses on SOLO reading tasks correlate positively with performance on writing tasks; postgraduates students manifest a higher level of thinking than undergraduates.

Students working in an online environment are isolated from their educators and other learners. Asynchronous discussion forums are often used to provide the learner with assistance, support and the social structures more readily available in the face-to-face environment. A further benefit of online discussion forums is the enabling of the development of electronic learning communities. However, the operation of these communities has required learners and educators to adopt behaviours and strategies appropriate for communication within this medium. This paper presents a model for electronic learning communities developed from studies of computing students and their teaching staff. The studies found that the development of an electronic learning community was largely student driven; however, staff had key roles to play in this process. The paper concludes with a set of strategies for the establishment and effective management of these communities.

This paper presents an analysis of results of a survey of graduate students in IT courses that aimed to gain an understanding of their views of cheating and knowledge of their cheating practice. The survey was part of an investigation into the cheating behaviour of IT students within the Faculty of Information Technology of Monash University. Using a factor analysis technique, categories of cheating behaviour and categories of reasons that could cause cheating or prevent cheating were identified. These were then used to determine possible influences on different types of cheating behaviour. A search of the literature has shown that there is a scarcity of studies of cheating behaviour of IT students, especially at the graduate level. The results of this study are informing an education program and development of policy on student cheating within our Faculty.

Web-based discussion forums are used in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University. The enthusiastic adoption of these facilities by students has impacted upon staff worklods and recently concerns have been raised by staff about the time and effort required to manage them. Furthermore, it has been difficult to determine the pedagogical value of these facilities and the level of educational support they provide to the teaching and learning community. This paper reports on staff use and management of discussion forums in their courses, and their perceptions of the value of these facilities as a source of help for students and a mechanism to provide feedback to staff. A final outcome of the study will be the establishment of guidelines for staff and students for the effective use of these facilities.

In 2001, a Web-based tool (WIER) was provided for 175 final year IT students to use in their capstone project for an external client. The tool is multifaceted in that it provides facilities for project management, artefact reuse from past projects and administration Of the projects. Furthermore, WIER provides facilities for a number of different user types namely student, client, supervisor and coordinator. Evaluations performed during 2001 indicate that students generally found WIER a useful resource.

An innovative IT summer school for secondary school students at Monash University, Australia, was designed to inform and interest participants in the range of course and career options available in the IT field. This paper reports on a comparative study that investigated the impact of the summer school on male and female students' awareness and interest in different aspects of IT, and what influence the summer school had on their intentions for future course selection and career choice. The decreasing percentages of females in IT courses are a concern in Australian universities. A review of other studies presents some of the possible reasons for the lack of interest females show in IT courses and careers.

The change to a studio based teaching model in one core subject of a traditionally delivered IT degree has necessitated a complete redesign of the teaching space and a restructure of the teaching and learning approach. This paper reports on first year students' reactions to the new learning space, the IT tools and infrastructure, the change in teaching philosophy and a new method of assessment. A survey was used determine how the students used the new environment and their perceptions of its value to their learning compared to the traditional lecture-tutorial style approach.

A study of cheating and plagiarism using a scenario based format, has provided an insight into attitudes towards questionable work practices of first year information technology students' within the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering of Monash University, and the School of Information Technology of Swinburne University. Students at both institutions showed similar responses to a range of cheating behaviours, in line with other literature. Plagiarism and cheating are widely tolerated and commonly practised, at least on the lower end of the spectrum of seriousness. However there were some areas of significant difference between the two student samples that warrant further research to develop strategic approaches for limiting cheating practices.

No abstract available.

This paper examines the attitudes of students in the Masters of Information Technology, Honours Degree in the Bachelor of Computing and Graduate Diploma of Computing at Monash University. Students were surveyed on the acceptability of a variety of scenarios involving cheating and on their knowledge of the occurrence of these scenarios. The survey found a strong consensus amongst the students as to what was acceptable or unacceptable practice. The paper then examines the significance of these results for educators aiming to prevent cheating amongst their students. The study reported is part of a larger study currently being undertaken in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) at Monash University.

No abstract available.

This paper discusses a strategy for developing shared teaching resources to support Java programming subjects taught using a variety of educational approaches (lectures and tutorials, problem-based learning, distance education) with differing computing focii (computer science, commercial computing, network computing).The strategy is a group process involving six distinct stages: selecting the topic areas considered integral to all subjects for which the resources will be used; defining the details and identifying areas / concepts of a topic; determining basic, intermediate and advanced levels of information; determining appropriate educational techniques that support the desired learning objectives for the concept; investigating existing resources and building new resources, both with and without the use of computer technology.

In 1997, surveys of a group of introductory programming students, in a class with a predominance of repeat students (i.e., students who had previously failed the subject), provided an opportunity to establish a profile of the weakest students. These students were the "alienated" ones who had not wanted to do this course in the first place, had little motivation to learn programming, and were characterised by poor class attendance and low work output. In 1998 a new learning environment, tailored to these students' special needs, was implemented to encourage them to achieve success. Improvement was observed in many aspects of the learning behaviour of these students.

In an attempt to improve the teaching and learning of first year programming, a weekly one-hour discussion class was added in 1996 to the lectures and microcomputer laboratory sessions that students attended. Discussion classes were held in classrooms without computers, and students were provided with enjoyable activities to perform in small groups. The activities forced discussion of new programming concepts, and helped students to clarify their understanding of them. The tutors' role was to provoke discussion rather than simply providing answers. Student results that year showed an improvement. In 1997, for financial reasons, the discussion classes were discontinued, and student results deteriorated. As a consequence, discussion classes have been reinstated in 1998. The language used to implement the programming concepts in each of these years was C++.

The high failure and low retention rates of students in introductory programming courses are of growing concern.This study looks at a group of students who are repeating an introductory programing subject, exploring issues which may affect their learning and ultimate success. Comparisons are made with a group of new students undertaking the same subject.The students were surveyed in the middle and at the end of one semester. A profile of the students, focussing on their motivation for their course selection and commitment to this course, was established. Their opinions on the usefulness of their classes, various resources, tutorial work and assignment work were sought. The needs and concerns of these students, highlighted in the surveys, are discussed and suggestions are made for the establishment of a special learning environment for failing students.

A collaborative project between the Computing faculty and the Education faculty of Monash University was aimed at improving the teaching and learning of first year programming. After initial research had identified the problems, some improvements were attempted during 1996. One department was willing and able to make major changes to its subjects immediately. The sequence of two first year programming subjects was restructured and redesigned. The progress of the project was monitored via direct observation, email and the World Wide Web. An improvement in the percentage of students who achieved very good results marked the project as a success.