While designing a database at the conceptual level using the Entity-Relationship (ER) model is challenging for novices, mapping an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) to a relational schema is not an easy task, either. One of the problems is students’ lack of understanding of the underlying mapping principles. The mental gap between the two models in students also makes it difficult for them to perform the conversion. This paper describes two studies that aimed at helping students fill the gap and improve their ERD-Relational schema mapping performance by the use of a visualization tool, MySQL Workbench. We investigated the effect of using MySQL Workbench in teaching ERD-Relational schema mapping. We identified the pros and cons of using visualization in teaching the topic. Our results show that visualization can increase student interest and engagement, and facilitate students connecting the concepts in the two models. With an instructional delivery method that emphasizes the underlying mapping principles, a visualization tool could help undergraduate students improve their performance on ERD-relational schema mapping and facilitate their understanding of the ER model.

The use of software is an essential part of our modern lives. Hence, this increases the importance of studying Software Engineering (SE) course. In general, the software engineering graduates usually lack the necessary skills, expertise, abilities, and sufficient knowledge when beginning their careers in the software industry. Due to that, a majority of students find it difficult to find relevant jobs. This paper proposes novel methods to teach SE course to improve the teaching and enhance knowledge and skills of students. It is proposed to include: identifying the course learning objectives (CLOs) and the required skills of the SE course, combining cooperative learning and mastery learning strategies to teaching software engineering, using social media to teach SE course, and establish the OSES in an educational institution. The goal of this paper is to improve the quality of SE teaching and facilitate students learning to prepare them for their future careers. Qualitative technique is used as a research design to evaluate the proposed solution. The results indicate that this proposal is supported by the majority of professionals working in the academia and industry.

Active learning has warranted great promise in improving student engagement and learning. It is not a new thought and has been promoted and encouraged as early as the 1980s. Due to the many benefits of active learning it is being practiced by many faculty in their classrooms. Faculty are urged to self-reflect on their teaching styles and work on improving the pedagogies to capture and maintain student interest by increasing student engagement. Although active learning has been used as an instrument to engage students and ultimately increase learning, it has seldom been implemented to directly impact learning relative to time. This paper explores the application of active learning pedagogy to help achieve maximum learning in a limited period of time. The active learning method employed in this study is grounded in classic pedagogies that have been developed based on various psychological theories of learning, motivation and engagement. After the employment of a series of this active learning technique a survey of the students revealed an increase in student learning.

Examinations are one of the most important activities that take place in institutions of learning. In many Nigerian universities, series of meetings are held to manually examine and approve computed student examination results. During such meetings, students‟ results are scrutinized. Reasonable explanations must be provided for any anomaly that is discovered in a result before the result is approved. This result approval process is prone to some challenges such as fatigue arising from the long duration of the meetings and wastage of man-hours that could have been used for other productive tasks. The aim of this work is to build decision tree models for automatically detecting anomalies in students‟ examination results. The Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data mining workbench was used to build decision tree models, which generated interesting rules for each anomaly. Results of the study yielded high performances when evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, a Windows-based anomaly detection tool was built which incorporated the decision tree rules.

Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a radical technology, which works at Nanoscale. Due to its numerous advantages over the conventional CMOS-based digital circuits, researchers are now concentrating more on designing digital circuits using this technology. Researchers have reported various findings in this field till now. In this paper, a modular 2:1 Multiplexer has been designed followed by its application in the designing of 1-bit parallel memory. A 4:1 MUX is designed using cascading of two 2:1 multiplexers. This paper also incorporates a comparative analysis of the proposed circuits with some previous designs. This comparison indicates that the designed Multiplexer is showing a considerable reduction in cell count as well as in the area. Here the design and simulation of the circuits are done using QCA Designer Ver. 1.40. Power dissipation simulation analysis of the designed 4:1 multiplexer is also done using QCA Pro tool.

Testing is a crucial step in designing and implementing software in the distributed environment. Testing in the distributed applications is not only difficult, but also a costly method. This Research briefly discusses the performance testing in the distributed software environment along with different other testing techniques proposed in the literature that correspond to distributed applications. Additionally, we discuss the key testing challenges faced during the whole process of testing the distributed applications. Much of the focus of this paper is on intelligent agent-based testing. Agent based testing is provide better coordination mechanism between multiple testers and exert more controllability and observablility on fault detection. In this study we have critically analyzed testing methodologies being practiced in the distributed environment. We have studied the merits and limitations of these methodologies proposed in the contemporary literature and have identified the possible improvements in those methodologies to make them more robust.

Adhoc networks uses mobile nodes to communicate among itself in which it does not have any fixed infrastructure like access point or base station. Due to dynamic network topology MANET security is a challenging task. Most of the routing protocols in MANET assumes a cooperative environment for communication. But, in the presence of malicious nodes, providing security to MANET is critical issue. Due to the increasing applications of MANET building an effective intrusion detection system are essential. This paper addresses using an intelligent approach for intrusion detection in MANET using cross layer technique. We show an paradigm of SVMs, FDAs and AIS approaches for intrusion detection in terms of classification accuracy.

The increasing use of e-mail in the world because of its simplicity and low cost, has led many Internet users are interested in developing their work in the context of the Internet. In the meantime, many of the natural or legal persons, to sending e-mails unrelated to mass. Hence, classification and identification of spam emails is very important. In this paper, the combined Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms and Artificial Neural Network for feature selection and Support Vector Machine to classify and separate spam used have and finally, we compared the proposed method with other methods such as data classification Self Organizing Map and K-Means based on criteria Area Under Curve. The results indicate that the Area Under Curve in the proposed method is better than other methods.