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The authors present Jeroo, a pedagogical tool that provides a gentler introduction to objectnriented programming. Jeroo has been developed to help novice programmers learn the bosic notions of using objects to solve a problem. learn to write methods that support a functional decomposition of the task, and learn the semantics offundamental control structures. Jeroo 's syntax provides a smooth transition to Avo, C++, or C#. The user interface has a single window in which everything is always visible. Source code highlighting. simple animation, and a continuously updated status panel provide a rich teaching and learning environment. Jeroo has been class tested at Northwest Missouri State University, and has proven to be an effective tool for working with novice programmers. Used in thejirst four weeks o f a Java programming class,Jeroo produced a significant increase in student comfort and conjidence levels, especially among female students. Jeroo and user documentation are available at p .

Successful software engineering requires experience and acknowledgment of complexity, including that which leads designers to recognize ambiguity within the software design description itself. We report on a study of 21 post-secondary institutions from the USA, UK, Sweden, and New Zealand. First competency and graduating students as well as educators were asked to perform a software design task. We found that as students go from first competency to graduating seniors they tend to recognize ambiguities in under-specified problems. Additionally, participants who recognized ambiguity addressed more requirements of the design.

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Jeroo is a tool that has been developed to help students in beginning programming courses learn the semantics of fundamental control structures, learn the basic notions of using objects to solve problems, and learn to write methods that support a functional decomposition of the task. Jeroo is similar to Karel the Robot and its descendants, but has a narrower scope than Karel's descendants and has a syntax that provides a smoother transition to either Java or C++. Jeroo has been class tested at Northwest Missouri State University, and has proven to be an effective tool for working with students in a beginning programming class. Jeroo and user documentation are available at

In today's technology-laden society human -computer interaction (HCI) is an important knowledge area for computer scientists and software engineers. This paper surveys existing approaches to incorporate HCI into computer science (CS) and such related issues as the perceived gap between the interests of the HCI community and the needs of CS educators. It presents several implementations of the HCI subset of the CC 0 01 curricular guidelines, targeting CS educators with varying degrees of HCI expertise. These implementations include course/module outlines from freshman to graduate levels, suggested texts, and project ideas and issues, such as programming languages and environments. Most importantly, each outline incorporates Bloom's taxonomy to identify the depth of knowledge to be mastered by students. This paper condenses collaborative contributions of 26 HCI/CS educators aiming to improve HCI coverage in mainstream CS curricula.

Evaluating individual students is especially difficult in a Directed Project course because the content is dictated by the projects rather than by a fixed syllabus.By merging the evaluation process with the project management tasks, and by using prepared checklists for peer, task, and meeting evaluations, students working in a group may be evaluated as individuals and the same grading criteria may be applied to all students even though they are working on different projects.

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