In recent years, the use of student response systems (SRS, also known as clickers) in the classroom setting has increased considerably, and researchers have developed a growing interest in their effect on learning and student engagement. This review analyses trends in SRS research by providing a brief history of SRS technology and usage as well as a detailed review of research in this field. In addition, this review focuses on the pedagogical implications of SRSs for education and analyses common criticisms of this emerging educational technology. Finally, research identifying common trends in SRS development is compiled and areas for future research are identified. The outcome of this leads to an understanding of best practices for this technology in a university setting.

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places small teams of students on different features of a common product. This creates two layers of collaboration, as students work within their teams on individual features, and the teams must interoperate with many other teams on the common product. The class uses continuous integration practices and predominantly asynchronous communication channels (Slack and GitHub) to facilitate this collaboration. The original goal of this design was to ensure that students would authentically experience issues associated with realistically sized software projects, and learn to apply appropriate software engineering and collaboration practices to overcome them, in a course without significant extra staffing. Data from the development logs showed that most commits take place outside synchronous class hours, and the project operates as a temporally distributed team even though the students are geographically co-located. Since 2015, a course adapted from this format has also been taught at the University of New England (UNE), an Australian regional university that is also a longstanding provider of distance education. In this course, most students study online, and the class has to be able to work globally, because as well as students taking part from around Australia, there are also typically a small number of students taking part from overseas. Transferring the course to a smaller but predominantly online institution has allowed us to evaluate the distributed nature of the course, by considering what aspects of the course needed to change to support students who are geographically distributed, and comparing how the two cohorts behave. This has produced an overall course design, to teach professional distributed software engineering practices, that is adaptable from large classes to small, and from local to global.

This study aimed to investigate how the use of a smartphone clicker app by a group of 390 Saudi Arabian male undergraduate students would impact their learning performance while participating in a computer science class. The smartphone clicker app was used by the students during peer group discussions and to respond to teacher questions. A conceptual framework identified teacher-student and student-student interactions, collaborative learning, and student engagement as three primary practices that could improve student performance when a smartphone clicker app was used. The relationships between these factors were tested empirically by participant completion of a self-administered online survey. This study found the use of a smartphone clicker app promoted increased teacher-student and student-student interactivity, leading to active collaboration learning by students and improved learning performance. No positive relationship was found between the smartphone clicker app use and increased student engagement. These results demonstrated the role of the smartphone clicker app in enhancing the learning experience of the Saudi undergraduate students included in this study, but not the overall student engagement. Further research into how use of a smartphone clicker app in classroom settings might promote student engagement to improve the overall learning performance is needed.

Studio courses have become a key way in which professional skills, especially those involving collaboration and design, are taught in many fields, including computer science. Studios typically involve students working on a design problem, periodically presenting their work for critique, and critiquing the work of other students or groups. They support productive inquiry, as well as teamwork, communication, and reflection. However, although studios have become an important mode of instruction for on-campus students, they have not typically been offered for online or distance education students. In this paper we describe a studio critique process that is designed to work asynchronously, using short videos, and a tool that we have built to support it. We also describe qualitative observations from a pilot study, in which video-based critiques were used at a university whose students predominantly study online rather than on-campus.

MetaMood is a gamified Android application, developed from an existing paper-based health intervention program, designed to increase the motivation and engagement of participants. The development process followed a clinician-based design which was necessary to avoid exposing participants to an untested and unverified clinical tool. This paper describes design considerations and outcomes which could be useful for similar gamification attempts. It also presents the implementation and evaluation of a clinician review process, a vital step required before a full clinical trial. The success of MetaMood, evaluated through the results of the clinician review, suggests that a similar design, development, and evaluation process should be followed by future mobile e-health interventions before they are released through a public App Store.

Most papers on introducing children to computing assume the children will interact directly with the technology or task. In this paper, we reflect on a case of designing for indirect interaction - where it is not the children's hands but a facilitator's on the device. The context is a computing lecture we gave for twenty-six children aged between five and seven years old. This was specifically designed to give a stylized experience of being a university student - it is self-consciously a lecture emphasising student-teacher interaction around code. We found a technique from undergraduate engineering education - a partially exposed simulation in a text-based programming language - allowed imaginative interaction from the children as they discovered they could model the impossible.

This research describes a study into the ability of a state of the art reinforcement learning algorithm to learn to perform multiple tasks. We demonstrate that the limitation of learning to performing two tasks can be mitigated with a competitive training method. We show that this approach results in improved generalization of the system when performing unforeseen tasks. The learning agent assessed is an altered version of the DeepMind deep Q–learner network (DQN), which has been demonstrated to outperform human players for a number of Atari 2600 games. The key findings of this paper is that there were significant degradations in performance when learning more than one game, and how this varies depends on both similarity and the comparative complexity of the two games.

Increasingly, education is offered to students any time, anywhere, for any stage of life, for students with any background and a wide variety of goals. This implies it is taken at different times, in different places, at different paces, by students with different technical backgrounds who are on different pathways. Students are becoming ever more isolated except for the teaching and technology that connects them. In our software development teaching, we find this combines with differences in technology choice and technical environment between students to produce classes filled with groups of students who face very different challenges. Course design, then, increasingly has to take account of the different forms of variation within the class, so that it can not only cope with them but turn them to an advantage of diversity. Some of these differences, such as the particular degree path by which a student reached the subject, are not refined questions of the student as an individual, but coarse differences imposed by external constraints (such as their differing degree rules or the location they are studying from). As these differences are external to the student, I refer to them in the paper as fragmentation rather than variation. This paper is a case study of software development teaching at a regional Australian university, identifying the kinds of fragmentation within it, and the various strategies (including the mundane) we have used to turn it to an advantage.

In previous work we introduced a software studio course in which seventy students used continuous integration practices to collaborate on a common legacy code base. This enabled students to experience the issues of realistically sized software projects, and learn and apply appropriate techniques to overcome them, in a course without significant extra staffing. Although the course was broadly successful in its goals, it received a mixed response from students, and our paper noted several issues to overcome. This paper considers experimental changes to the course in light of our previous findings, and additional data from the official student surveys. Two iterations of the course and their respective results are compared. Whereas our previous paper addressed the feasibility of such a course, this paper considers how the student experience can be improved. The paper also considers how such a course can be adapted for more heterogeneous cohorts, such as the introduction of an unknown number of design and database students, or the introduction of online students.

Previous courses addressing the gap between student and professional programming practice have either isolated small groups' development in such a way that larger scale difficulties that motivate many professional practices do not arise, or have required significant additional staffing that would be expensive to provide in a large cohort core undergraduate software engineering course. We describe the first iteration of a course that enabled 73 students to work together to improve a large common legacy code base using professional practices and tools, staffed only by two lecturers and two undergraduate students employed as part-time tutors. The course relies on continuous integration and automated metrics, that coalesce frequently updated information in a manner that is visible to students and can be monitored by a small number of staff. The course is supported by a just-in-time teaching programme of thirty-two technical topics. We describe the constraints that determined the design of the course, and quantitative and qualitative data from the first iteration of the course.