The Blackbox project, a perpetual data collection project that collects data from worldwide users of the BlueJ IDE -- a programming environment designed for novice programmers, is described and some of the analysis challenges that lie ahead are discussed.
The frequency, time-to-fix, and spread of errors among users, showing how these factors inter-relate, in addition to their development over the course of the year, can inform the design of courses, textbooks and also tools to target the most frequent errors.
The extended and re-integrated JCSP library of CSP packages for Java integrates the differing advances made by Quickstone's JCSP Network Edition and the "core" library maintained at Kent, requiring signifi- cant internal re-structuring.
A CSP library for C++, developed over the past year at the University of Kent, based on the OO-design and API of JCSP and the lightweight algorithms of KRoC occam, with extensions to exploit specific C++ capabilities (such as templates).
A national network of teaching excellence which is being set up to combat the issue of insufficient numbers of teachers is described, and the other challenges that lie ahead of computer science in UK schools are described.
Using a combination of grassroots teacher activities and policy lobbying at a national level, CAS has been able to rapidly gain traction in the fight for computer science in schools, and how the experience of CAS in the UK can benefit other similar organisations, such as the CSTA in the USA.
New and existing algorithms for dealing with the run-queue and implementing channels, barriers and mutexes and other issues related to the new design and related to implementing concurrency in a language like C++ that has no direct support for it are described.
This paper analyzes the issues involved in the transition from blocks to text and argues that they can be overcome by using frame-based editing as an intermediate step, and proposes a new style of program manipulation to bridge the gap.
It is found that educators formed only a weak consensus about which mistakes are most frequent, that their rankings bore only a moderate correspondence to the students in the Blackbox data, and that educators' experience had no effect on this level of agreement.
This study combined two years of the Blackbox dataset with a survey of 76 educators to investigate which mistakes students make while learning to program Java, and whether the educators could make an accurate estimate of which mistakes were most common.