ICT Education

The Southern African Computer Lecturers’ Association (SACLA) is a formal association of academics involved in education, lecturing and teaching of Computer Science (CS), Information Systems (IS) and related Information Technology (IT) subjects at universities and other Higher Education Institutions throughout Southern Africa. SACLA celebrated 50 years of existence in 2021. The main activity of SACLA is an annual conference, where issues relating to CS, IS and IT education, teaching and research in Southern Africa are presented and discussed. Departments of Computer Science were established at several universities in South Africa during the period 1969 to 1970. SACLA started in 1971 as an initiative of IBM to “Teach the Teacher”. The 50-year history of SACLA is presented in this paper, and academics involved in the first SACLA 4-day conferences shared memories and documentation. The paper presents an overview of the 50 conferences hosted, related activities at conferences and the future of SACLA.

Rocking the boat is a teaching strategy to rapidly teach tertiary computer science students the required group and communication skills for software engineering. This strategy proposes the introduction of high-risk factors into the group dynamics over short time periods. Group instability is regarded as a risk factor. It is introduced by reshuffling groups between successive rounds. The main examples of allocation methods applied during reshuffling include random allocation, academic standing, participation level and Belbin roles. The reshuffling of groups should ensure that subsequent groups remain heterogeneous with regards to contact between students, that is minimise the inter-group connectedness. Current group formation methods and related software do not focus on the inter-group connectedness over successive group allocations. The construction and tracing of groups by hand to ensure a minimum inter-group connectedness is time-consuming and prone to error. This paper provides a genetic algorithm from the subset of evolutionary algorithms to minimise inter-group connectedness. The proposed algorithm reduces the time and error in constructing groups based on random allocation over successive rounds.

In March of 2020, many of us were required to move our classes to an online mode – often with very little notice. For many faculty and students this was the first time we found ourselves in a learning environment that was not only unexpected but for many, not what they wanted. Special measures were called for, and unfortunately, it seems very possible we may need to continue to move between face-to-face and online classes as the pandemic ebbs and flows. Drawing on many years of diverse experience in online teaching, this paper provides some guidance for those inexperienced in online teaching in regards to the pedagogical changes that are necessary – what can work and what is likely to be problematic. The paper is written in two sections – the first is focused on using the Learning Management System to facilitate a quick move to online learning and the second part covers some of the longer-term difficulties that should be considered as we progress or move to the new environment.

Higher education in South Africa has been in the spotlight in the past few years with calls for decolonisation of the curriculum and other matters. We teach a first-year programming module that is challenging to decolonise since the origin of programming languages is inherently Western. Students often do not resonate with some examples used, let alone abstract concepts of programming in general. During COVID-19, emergency remote teaching and learning were adopted and we had to be mindful of various limitations, such as data usage and bandwidth. We experienced difficulty expanding each student's frame of reference. Furthermore, increased academic dishonesty occurrences were encountered. This paper focuses on contextualising the module content, promoting computational thinking, and reducing academic dishonesty. This was achieved in an action research cycle through enriching our assessment practices by creating a weekly assignment where the principles of computational thinking were applied within a problem-solving learning environment. It was found that most students had positive perceptions about the intervention and their views and experiences are reported.

It is challenging to adapt higher education at the same pace as the fast-changing nature of the information technology (IT) sector. Creative ways are needed to accommodate the continuous changes in the IT industry, without needing to change the structure of the curriculum. As the IT industry comprises of project teams in project environments, a suitable instructional approach for IT higher education is project-based learning (PBL). A PBL strategy allows for the instruction of current technologies and contributes to skills development that is required in the IT industry. General guidelines and characteristics for PBL are followed across the board for all disciplines on a trial and error basis. Some guidelines may not be directly applicable to IT higher education, while other needed guidelines do not exist because they are domain-specific. The purpose of this paper is to present guidelines for PBL that is relevant to IT higher education. The guidelines are formulated using popular characteristics of PBL from literature and adapting them to the context of IT projects. Additional guidelines are added based on specific requirements of IT projects that are relevant to professional practice. A literature review matrix is presented as evidence of sources where the guidelines were adapted from. The guidelines can be used by educators who find it challenging to assess whether they are implementing a suitable PBL approach. Additionally, following the guidelines may contribute towards bridging the skills gap between IT higher education and the IT industry.

Computational thinking (CT) is gaining recognition as an important skill for learners in both Computer Science (CS) and several other disciplines, including mathematics. In addition, researchers have shown that there is a direct correlation between poor mathematical skills and the high attrition rate of CS undergraduates. This research investigates the use of nine core CT skills in the South African Grades 10–12 Mathematics curriculum by mapping these skills to the objectives given in each of the topics in the curriculum. The artefact developed shows that all the identified CT skills are used in the curriculum. With the use of this mapping, future research on interventions to develop these skills through mathematics at secondary school, should produce school leavers with better mathematical and problem solving abilities, which in turn, might contribute to better success rates in CS university courses.

Novices tend to make unnecessary errors when they write programming code. Many of these errors can be attributed to the novices’ fragile knowledge of basic programming concepts. Programming instructors also find it challenging to develop teaching and learning strategies that are aimed at addressing the specific programming challenges experienced by their students. This paper reports on a study aimed at (1) identifying the common programming errors made by a select group of novice programmers, and (2) analyzing how these common errors changed at different stages during an academic semester. This exploratory study employed a mixed-methods approach based on the Framework of Integrated Methodologies (FraIM). Manual, structured content analysis of 684 programming artefacts, created by 38 participants and collected over an entire semester, lead to the identification of 21 common programming errors. The identified errors were classified into four categories: syntax, semantic, logic, and type errors. The results indicate that semantic and type errors occurred most frequently. Although common error categories are likely to remain the same from one assignment to the next, the introduction of more complex programming concepts towards the end of the semester could lead to an unexpected change in the most common error category. Knowledge of these common errors and error categories could assist programming instructors in adjusting their teaching and learning approaches for novice programmers.

The field of Information Systems (IS) is characterised by a number of properties that combine to create particular challenges for teaching and learning. These properties include its close ties with rapidly advancing digital technology, its interdisciplinary nature and its general lack of a strong, broadly agreed-upon theoretical core. In the present study, I undertake an autoethnographic investigation of five key challenges for teaching in IS which result from one or more of these properties. To provide theoretical scaffolding for the investigation I adopt Weick’s theory of sensemaking and apply it to investigate both my own and my students’ processes of sensemaking. I propose that to effectively navigate these challenges and prepare students for careers in IS, lecturers should aim to develop their students’ technical and social skills sets such that they are able to navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity that characterise socio-technical systems in practice. To this end, I outline the strategies I have adopted in my attempts to achieve this aim.

The development of problem-solving skills continues to be a challenge in various disciplines including Computer Science. In this study, we used the principles of the Decoding the Disciplines (DtDs) paradigm to better understand the mental processes that novice programmers follow when answering source code comprehension (SCC) related questions. This understanding can be fundamental in helping novices to overcome problem-solving related challenges. While focusing on step 1 of the DtDs paradigm, the aim of this study was threefold. Firstly, we explored the problem-solving strategies utilised by novice programmers while they were attempting to answer SCC related questions. Secondly, the identified problem-solving strategies were mapped onto Polya’s four problem-solving steps. Finally, we utilised a SWOT analysis as a tool to identify problem-solving related learning bottlenecks. This study utilised an integrated methodological approach where data was collected by means of asking questions, observations, and artefact analysis. Thematic analysis of the collected data revealed a range of problem-solving strategies that these novice programmers utilised while performing various SCC tasks. These strategies were then mapped onto Polya’s problem-solving steps. Based on a SWOT analysis of these strategies, we identified six problem-solving bottlenecks that point to difficulties that are not sufficiently addressed in introductory CS courses.

This paper investigates the significance of ERP Education on postgraduate students who took an ERP short course at the University of Zambia. The paper identifies the benefits of ERP education in Zambia as well as the contextual factors that impacted ERP education. These contextual factors were identified as industry, course and student constraints. Thematic networks showing the benefits of ERP education, the constraints on ERP education and the preliminary relationships are also presented. Universities seeking to integrate ERP systems into their curriculum and organisations seeking to hire ERP graduates would therefore benefit from these findings.