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Executive SummaryStudents entering university from school often experience difficulties as they adapt to tertiary life. During this time of transition, students must adjust to new teaching and learning environments as well as different social and physical environments. Students in computing degree programs face particular problems. For example, they can have misconceptions about studying computing at university because their experiences with computers at home or at school usually bear little resemblance to what they study in a tertiary computing degree. Research has identified the key issues relating to transition, however the methods to address this problem to date have had mixed success.In this paper we discuss an approach to tackling the transition problem. In 1999 the "Smart House" project was developed for an IT Summer School. This project aimed to address transition issues by helping secondary school students make informed tertiary study choices and preparing them for changes they may experience in moving to university. The development and implementation of the Smart House project was a collaborative initiative from staff representing four undergraduate degree programs within the Faculty of Information Technology of Monash University, Australia. The project was designed to demonstrate the application and relevance of computing to everyday life. It required a carefully planned teaching and learning environment, and specifically designed teaching resources, to create a cohesive project which encompassed a broad range of computing topics and provided a worthwhile educational experience. The Smart House project has been run for five successive Summer Schools and evaluation of feedback from students, parents and teachers indicates that the project has been successful in meeting its objectives of addressing transition issues of future computing students. This paper presents an overview of the transition problem and in particular the difficulties faced by first year computing students. An outline of the Smart House project and the specific aspects of the project that address transition issues are described. Results of a follow-up study of participating students in their first year of university are presented, and the effectiveness of the Smart House project and Summer School in providing students with knowledge of computing degree programs and a realistic view of the tertiary teaching and learning environment is evaluated.

Students in the final year of the Bachelor of Computing degree at Monash University must do a full year group project as a capstone subject. Each group of five or six builds a real system which is normally for a client outside the university. The project usually necessitates learning some skills that have not been taught in the course. Each group works on a different project. The emphasis is on management issues and the software development process as much as on the product, with a set of deliverables and deadlines throughout the year, and an assessment strategy reflecting this.

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