Undergraduates in business computing and computer science (poster session)

that there are different rationalities to be identified among those groups working together in order to produce knowledge: academics, technologists, industrialists and lay men and women. A computer science professional has to consider all these viewpoints in order to develop scientific and technological knowledge, which is socially appropriate and relevant. A debate about ethics within and among disciplines and interests is Crucial since there is a need to establish new rules for the emerging global and virtual society. The rejection of indifference is crucial nowadays. The ethical debate, more than ever, has social implications unknown in other times. Information systems are able to process huge amounts of data but ordy human beings can turn data into ethical knowledge. Objects are widely used in modem software-not just only in programming but practically in all software systems, such as Windows 95, MS Office etc. Object concept is also useful in other disciplines: physics and biology for example. The author has developed a special educational computer program "System Builder" ("SB"), which allows constructing system from different objects. This pedagogical tool can be used in different audiences both for formation of object slant to the phenomenon analysis and for introduction to modem programming systems like Delphi and Visual Basic. Main concepts of the program are object, its type, property and method. To make learning of these theoretical categories more interesting in "SB", we study them projecting and building a virtual world on the display screen. At first we define types of objects which exist in our world (e.g. car, bus, traffic light and others). Each of them posses the set of properties and methods. An easy and natural language of methods can describe how objects of our world move, interact, change images and even disappear. The last step is to create the concrete objects of prepared types: carl and car2, busl etc. We can see these objects on the screen immediately. All we have to do then is to switch on system timer and watch the development of virtual world in accordance with laws we have determined. To make the process of world construction more easy, "SB" uses a special tables and electronic blanks. In our university, computer programming is taught to first-year undergraduates in business and science faculties. In this study a group of students from each faculty participated in a survey that measured learning style, previous computing experience, problem-solving ability and educational …