Achieving behaviour change: three generations of HIV/AIDS programming and jargon in Thailand

NGOs have played an important role worldwide in the fight to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through achieving behaviour change. NGOs have often been at the forefront of innovative changes, influencing government and international programming activities. This paper identifies and analyses the evolution of the HIV/AIDS programmes of one NGO in Thailand over a period of ten years. Three generations of programming are identified both through distinct approaches to this area of work and through the changing jargon used to describe the people the programmes are aimed at.

Design guidelines for children programming in school environment

This paper describes design guidelines of a programming environment for children, aiming to lower the barriers for children to learn programming. Our model called GBuilder has been developed on the basis of guidelines, with the express purpose of enabling and empowering the students to develop their own learning programs in survival literacy within enjoyable and fun environment.

Implementation of novel methods of global and nonsmooth optimization : GANSO programming library

We discuss the implementation of a number of modern methods of global and nonsmooth continuous optimization, based on the ideas of Rubinov, in a programming library GANSO. GANSO implements the derivative-free bundle method, the extended cutting angle method, dynamical system-based optimization and their various combinations and heuristics. We outline the main ideas behind each method, and report on the interfacing with Matlab and Maple packages.

Opportunities and challenges with J2SE 5 for introductory programming teaching

The recent release of the Java version 5.0 "Tiger" introduces some significant language changes. For educators, some of these changes provide opportunities to improve teaching, while others pose additional problems that require awareness to avoid them. The authors have recently completed the inclusion of support for all new language features into a wellknown educational IDE for Java – BlueJ – and in the course of doing so evaluated each of them for usefulness in education, and developed pedagogic strategies to handle the inherent opportunities and challenges. This has formed the basis of the design of the features in BlueJ which support the language changes. In this paper, we describe the results of our evaluation, provide recommendations on treatment of the new features in introductory courses and discuss how BlueJ may be used to illustrate important aspects.

Programming your - objects (turtles, textboxes, sliders and buttons) in microworlds

This article outlines some new-object commands of Logo Microworlds and includes the use of buttons, sliders and programmable colours. The ability to assign object properties including font, colour and frames are discussed. As is assigning object-instructions and commands such as click on and clickoff, launch and cancel. Programming the turtle, making a new turtle, running simultaneous turtles, programming graphic colours and sliders as well as understanding dotimes are explored.