While increasing the equitable participation in computer science (CS) education at schools, most existing studies focus on the acquisition of computational skills and measurements of cognitive skills as the learning outcome. The potential benefits of developing psychosocial attributes in the process of computational learning are of less concern, particularly for the underprivileged youth with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and from low-income family. To improve the inequitable learning in school, the "Project C program" has been developed to integrate computational participation and mentoring scheme through social-cognitive approach for underprivileged youth. The aim of this research is to investigate the psychosocial impact of the program, and examine the interrelation between hope, sense of community, and perceived social support in computational learning. The Project C program was piloted in a special school in Hong Kong under the category of "Schools for Children with Moderate Intellectual Disability," targeting 8th grade students (n = 51) with SEN (i.e., mild autism) living in low-income residential districts, and a self-reported pre/post questionnaire was administered to measure the psychosocial changes before and after the intervention. The findings reveal a statistically significant change in hope, sense of community, and perceived social support through the program, and the relation between sense of community and hope was fully mediated by the perceived social support. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications of social-cognitive approach to computational learning are discussed. Copyright © 2023 Springer.

Course management system (CMS) is expected to be a part of major system developments in educational intitutions as the information technology continues to emerge into all levels of education. Particularly, this trend has also been expanded to all post-secondary institutions. Indeed, the adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most institutions, yet it is often lack of flexibility to satisfy the special needs in the institutions, especially in our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance are expected, which stands as the stumbling block in the college development To solve our challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1] that offers an open and community source framework. In this paper, we propose a practical implementation method based on our design experience on our newly developed CMS using the Sakai project platform. Our approach is a cost effective solution with minimum resources usage such as the size of the development team, project time frame, and hardware requirements. In addition, technical backgrounds including the system architecture, software installation, tools development and system enhancements will be introduced and explained in details. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to the post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 IEEE.

As computing technology continues to emerge into all levels of education, a course management system (CMS) is expected to be part of the primary system developments, which offers an enormous impact, particularly in today's post-secondary institutions. The adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most educational institutions, yet it often lacks the flexibility to satisfy special needs of the institutions. This is especially true of our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance stand as stumbling blocks in the college's development of a CMS. To solve these challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1], a CMS that offers an open and community source framework. In preparation to the system design and development, a needs assessment has been conducted to investigate the project feasibility and functional requirements, which serve as the keystone to our system implementation. In this paper, we articulate the motivations, feasibility study results, functional requirements, as well as the highlights of our current progress, future implementation and evaluation. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 ACM.