The ongoing debate among Computer Science educators about the advantages and disadvantages of the shift from the procedural to the Object-Oriented paradigm usually relates to the introductory course. Indeed, we were also concerned when in our institute we decided to implement this shift in our introductory course and started to teach Java, instead of a procedural paradigm. In our previous study we saw that the effect of the shift did not lower the achievements of students taking the CS1 course. Furthermore, we wanted to be equally sure that this was the case when students take Data Structures courses. This is the focus of the study presented in this paper. The results show that there is no significant difference in the achievements of students who came from different paradigm backgrounds. This encouraging result probably relates to the fact that our CS1 course focuses on the fundamentals of introductory Computer Science and does not only emphasize the language aspects.

For some time, there has been an ongoing debate among Computer Science (CS) educators about the advantages and disadvantages of the shift from the procedural to the Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm. In our institution, we decided to implement this shift in the year 2005, when we changed our introductory course and started, right from the beginning, to teach the Java language, instead of the procedural facet of C++. While we still offered the two different paradigms in parallel, we had two similar groups each taking one of the paradigms. These two groups served as the research population of the study we describe in this paper. We examined whether the shift from the procedural to the OO paradigm had an effect on students' perception of fundamental concepts taught in the introductory course.

Among the prominent characteristics of the Open University of … is its teaching method: self-study through distance learning. Students from all parts of the country pursue various degrees at the University and the majority utilize advanced technologies for their studies. We will describe the curriculum for a teaching certificate in Computer Science, particularly the course "Methodology of Computer Science Teaching" which utilizes multi-media technologies expressly developed for distance learning.

Computer Science (CS) seems to be one of the few remaining disciplines almost entirely dominated by men, especially among university faculty and in the hi-tech industry. This phenomenon is prevalent throughout the western world. In Israel, we observed it in high schools where only 30% of the students who choose to major in CS are women. It continues in Israeli universities and colleges, where usually less than 30% of CS students are women. In this paper, we provide data describing the situation in Israeli high schools. In addition, we present a survey conducted among high school students which aimed, among other goals, to discover why girls did not choose to take CS in high school. We analyze the data and provide some conclusions and ways to deal with this situation.

The Open University of Israel offers an MSc program in Computer Science for students with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and a grade point average of at least 80. We will describe an experiment which we began a year ago in which we give an opportunity to those students who do not meet the requirements (average lower than 80) to improve their achievements.