Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

A Study On Ethical Hacking In Cybersecurity Education Within The United States, Jordan Chew

Master's Theses

As the field of computer security continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to educate the next generation of security professionals. However, much of the current education landscape primarily focuses on teaching defensive skills. Teaching offensive security, otherwise known as ethical hacking, is an important component in the education of all students who hope to contribute to the field of cybersecurity. Doing so requires a careful consideration of what ethical, legal, and practical issues arise from teaching students skills that can be used to cause harm. In this thesis, we first examine the current state of cybersecurity education in the …

Teaching Introductory Programming Concepts: A Comparison Of Scratch And Arduino, Anne Beug

Master's Theses

Computing has become an integral part of modern America. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2008 and 2018, the United States will have 1.4 million job openings in computing fields [1]. Since the early 2000's (just after the "dot com bust"), the number of students enrolled in computing majors (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, etc.) dropped precipitously by over 50%, only starting to rise again in 2009 [2]. One way to rectify to this gap between demand and supply is to start training students in computational thinking during high school. While the Computer Science Advanced Placement AB test has …

Supporting Introductory Test-Driven Labs With Webide, Thomas C. Dvornik

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a new web-based development environment for entry-level programmers with two primary goals: minimize tool barriers to writing computer programs and introduce software engineering best practices early in a student's educational career. Currently, WebIDE focuses on Test-Driven Learning (TDL) by using small iterative examples and introducing lock-step labs, which prevent the student from moving forward until they finish the current step. An initial set of labs and evaluators were created as examples of how to use WebIDE and were used in a pilot study in a CS0 course where students were split into two groups, one that used WebIDE …

Graduation Outliner, Jason Boyle

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Planning a quarterly course schedule is a difficult and laborious process for university students which must be repeated every quarter. Students are expected to determine which courses to take based on a large and complex set of requirement criteria. Most academic scheduling research has focused on faculty availability and desires. This project attempts to address the needs of students for whom no quarterly course schedule planning tool is widely available. A Java Swing-based application is described that allows students to create a graphical quarter-by-quarter visualization of the courses they plan to take. The application also accepts a list of graduation …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …