This study integrated object-oriented programming instruction with transfer training activities in everyday tasks, which might provide a mechanism that can be used for efficient problem solving. Specifically, a Visual BASIC embedded with everyday tasks group was compared to another group exposed to Visual BASIC instruction only. Subjects were 40 undergraduate students enrolled in 2 sections of a Visual BASIC programming class. Students in the 2 intact classes were assigned 1 of 2 instructional treatments. Problem-solving and programming competency instruments were used as a pre-and posttest measure. After an 8-week treatment, the results of the study did not show any significant difference between both groups on general problem solving ability as measured by the instrument used. Only 1 of the 4 problem-solving skills (Analysis of Attributes) measured, showed an improvement in performance favoring the programming plus everyday task group. Significant improvement in performance favoring the programming plus everyday task group versus the programming-only group was identified. An unexpected but significant difference between both groups on the programming competence test was also identified. Many investigators have examined the effectiveness of computer programming and applications on students' academic performance, achievement, and problem solving. The findings concerning the impact of computer programming experience

No abstract

In recent years, Web-based online teaching has grown substantially in many disciplines including Mathematical Sciences. Online courses in variety of subjects are being offered in many institutions. Offering online courses in Mathematics, Computer Science and other natural sciences disciplines posed a greater hardship on the developer because of the nature of the subject areas where more visual and face-to-face interaction are essential. An understanding of the student success factors of online collaborative programming can help alleviate the challenges encountered by the course developers. Adding the hands-on activities, tutorials, and cooperative learning experience in web courses can almost simulate the classroom environment to a great extent.This paper focuses on current literature review of successful pedagogical methods in providing quality online cooperative programming. Specifically, the paper reviews current literature on collaborative methods, programming and distance education, collaborative learning and online education, and the lessons learned from teaching online programming using cooperative learning methods. The authors' implementation of the various success factors identified from the literature review in their online cooperative programming course was also provided.

With large sets of text documents increasing rapidly, being able to efficiently utilize this vast volume of new information and service resource presents challenges to computational scientists. Text documents are usually modeled as a term-document matrix which has high dimensional and space vectors. To reduce the high dimensions, one of the various dimensionality reduction methods, concept decomposition, has been developed by some researchers. This method is based on document clustering techniques and leastsquare matrix approximation to approximate the matrix of vectors. However the numerical computation is expensive, as an inverse of a dense matrix formed by the concept vector matrix is required. In this paper we presented a class of multistep spare matrix strategies for concept decomposition matrix approximation. In this approach, a series of simple sparse matrices are used to approximate the decompositions. Our numerical experiments on both small and large datasets show the advantage of such an approach in terms of storage costs and query time compared with the least-squares based approach while maintaining comparable retrieval quality.