Electronic commerce software laboratory

With NSF support we developed a hands-on laboratory to augment our CS453 Electronic Commerce Technologies course. We conducted weekly lab sessions that covered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, CGI, SQL, ASP, and Flash programming. Each topic was covered over a period of one to three weeks and each topic was supported by 10 to 26 individual programming exercises. Four teaching assistants provided real-time support during the laboratory period. Answers to all exercises were accessible on-line so that no student would be needlessly delayed by any particular problem. In this paper we discuss the laboratory's design goals, topical content, and the students' performance, reactions, and suggestions for improvement.