Informatics in Education

Computing as a discipline has common roots with mathematics and written languages, and computing as a way of thinking and handling has been integral to human culture since ever. This is not only a reasonable argument for convincing society to consider informatics as one of the very fundamental pillars of education, but it also puts the potential contributions of teaching informatics in schools into the correct perspective in the context of science and humanities. Many European countries are switching from teaching information technologies to informatics education during the current second decade of this century. Informatics curriculum is becoming a central part of school education. We explain and design a way of developing informatics curriculum that offer the critical competences new generations need to survive and thrive in todays’ knowledge society and will allow them to contribute to the future development of society. These competences also strongly support the development of their intellectual potential and creativity. Our design of informatics curriculum takes into account the interaction with other scientific disciplines as well with the subject didactics, pedagogy and psychology. The starting point is merging constructionism and critical thinking. Constructionism with its “learning by doing” and “learning by getting things to work” enables designing a teaching process in which students acquire knowledge by creating products, analysing the properties and the functionality of their own products, and finally derive motivation to improve these products. Critical thinking asks us not to teach products of science and technology and their application, but to teach the creative process of their development. To implement this approach, we use the historical method allowing the students to learn by productive failures in the process of searching for a solution. To organize the process of learning and make the different steps available to the appropriate age groups we take into account the cognitive dimensions of the revised taxonomy of Bloom. To illustrate how the combination of all these concepts works we present a detailed curriculum for algorithm design, programming, robotics, and communication in networks.

Object-oriented programming distinguishes between instance attributes and methods and class attributes and methods, annotated by the static modifier. Novices encounter difficulty understanding the means and implications of static attributes and methods. The paper has two outcomes: (a) a detailed classification of aspects of understanding static, and (b) a collection of questions designed to serve as a learning/practice/diagnostic tool to address those aspects. Providing answers requires learners to apply higher-order cognitive skills and, hence, to advance their understanding of the essential meaning of the concept. Each question is analyzed according to three characteristics: (a) the static aspects that the question examines according to a detailed classification the paper provides; (b) identification of the question according: to Bloom’s revised taxonomy, to the Structure of Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy; and to the problem-solving keywords used in the question's formulation. Several recommendations for teaching are presented.

Emotions can influence cognitive development and are key elements to the teaching-learning process. Positive emotions (e.g., engagement) can improve the ability to solve problems, store information, and make decisions. On the other hand, negative emotions (e.g., boredom) reduce the capacity to process information at a deeper level, preventing learning to become effective. Therefore, students’ emotions must be regulated to hinder negative and to promote positive emotions during learning. To support the choice of the best intervention to regulate individual emotions, this article proposes an algorithm based on simulated data considering different individual performances in solving Algebra exercises. The results suggest that the proposed model has high success rates (over 90%) in the choice of interventions and may be applied in real scenarios.

Computing science which focuses on computational thinking, has been a compulsory subject in the Thai science curriculum since 2018. This study is an initial program to explore how and to what extend computing science that focused on STEM education learning approach can develop pre-service teachers' computational thinking. The online STEM-based activity-Computing Science Teacher Training (CSTT) Program was developed into a two-day course. The computational thinking test (CTT) data indicated pre-service teachers’ fundamental skills of computational thinking: decomposition, algorithms, pattern recognition, pattern generalization and abstractions. The post-test mean score was higher than the pre-test mean score from 9.27 to 10.9 or 13.58 percentage change. The content analysis indicated that there were five key characteristics founded in the online training program comprised: (1) technical support such as online meeting program, equipment, trainer ICT skills (2) learning management system such as Google Classroom, creating classroom section in code.org (3) the link among policy, curriculum and implementation (4) pre-service teachers' participation and (5) rigor and relevance of how to integrate the applications of computing science into the classroom.

Teaching introductory computer programming and choosing the proper tools and programming languages are challenging tasks. Most of the existing tools are not fully integrated into systems to support the teaching-learning processes. The present paper describes the usability evaluation of the Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle (VPL-Moodle) based on a satisfaction questionnaire answered by 37 undergraduate students enrolled in CS1 and CS2 courses and 7 lecturers. Moreover, a heuristic evaluation performed by two specialists is also presented. Results of the descriptive and inferential analysis revealed mainly two things: a) the VPL-Moodle has a low level of usability in all five aspects analyzed by the students: satisfaction, efficiency, learnability, helpfulness, and environment control; and b) lecturers found some difficulties using the VPL-Moodle. A number of suggestions for the improvement of the VPL-Moodle interface are provided based on the findings of the paper.

The digital transformation of teaching processes is guided and supported by the use of technological, human, organizational and pedagogical drivers in a holistic way. Education 4.0 aims to equip students with cognitive, social, interpersonal, technical skills, among others, in the face of the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and global challenges, such as mitigating the causes and effects of climate change based on people's awareness. This work presents the development and experimentation of a method, called TADEO - acronym in Portuguese language to Transformação Digital na Educação (digital transformation in education), to guide the design and application of teaching and learning experiences from groups of drivers of the digital transformation in education, aiming to achieve Education 4.0 objectives. The TADEO method was applied in the context of classes of basic subjects of elementary and higher education to increase students' understanding of climate change through the development of projects to mitigate environmental problems caused by anthropogenic action and, at the same time, exercise students the soft and hard skills required by 21st century learning and work. The results of the evaluations of students and educators participating in the teaching and learning experiences guided by the TADEO method point to the achievement of the expected purposes.

The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor´s viewpoint. This research aims to investigate if the use of student-focused approaches in the SE teaching can develop more technical competencies to apply in industry than when traditional approaches are applied. For this, an iterative model has been defined to integrate the main student-focused approaches and a controlled experiment was carried out in four undergraduate courses. The data were collected from structured interviews with students and analyzed using ANOVA. The results showed no significant statistical difference between student-focused and traditional teaching approaches in the development of SE competencies. However, these results were impacted by the motivation and commitment of the experiment students.

This paper presents an innovative educational approach to organizing the out-of-school teaching of programming in middle childhood. The proposed DGBL model includes three distinct educational phases, i.e. learning visual programming, programming and robotics, and programming and electronics. The research was carried out during the school years of 2017–2019. The study sample consists of 329 primary school students from K4 to K10 from the Lodzkie Voivodeship in Poland. The results were obtained from anonymous questionnaires completed by course participants. The answers confirm that the proposed approach helps children to learn the main concepts of computational thinking and programming. The described approach reinforces the essential idea in children that programming, engineering, mathematics and technology are intertwined in the modern world. Moreover, the approach combines and balances practical, methodological and pedagogical issues and is suitably integrated with out-of-school programming education to facilitate the teaching and learning process.

The Computational Thinking (CT) teaching approach allows students to practice problem-solving in a way that they can use the Computer Science mindset. In this sense, Collaborative Learning has a lot to contribute to educational activities involving the CT. This article presents the design and evaluation of a Collaborative Learning framework for the development of CT skills in students. To design the proposed strategy, several fundamental features of the Collaborative Learning concept of the literature have been studied and sketched. The strategy was applied to middle school students through a digital games programming workshop. Data were collected by three means: (1) collecting artifacts produced during activities; (2) recording of game programming sessions; and (3) applying a structured interview to students. The data analysis showed evidence that the strategy was able to mobilize Computational Thinking skills in addition to mobilizing collaborative skills in learners.

This study reports the findings of a program that aims to develop pre-service science teachers’ computational problem-solving skills and views on using information and communications technology in science education. To this end, pre-service science teachers were trained on computational thinking, computational problem solving, designing an algorithm, and Python coding, and then they were asked to solve problem situations determined within the science education program using the computational problem-solving process. The study was conducted in a faculty of education in Turkey and carried out conducted in an elective course in the spring semester of the 2019 - 2020 academic year (in an online platform due to the Covid-19 Pandemic). 38 pre-service science teachers were included in the study. In this process, pre-service science teachers’ conceptual development levels regarding computational thinking and their views regarding the use of ICT in schools were collected quantitatively. The development of computational problem-solving skills of pre-service science teachers was scored by a rubric developed in this study. According to the analyzes, pre-service science teachers increased knowledge of computational thinking (t = -5,969, p = .000), enhanced views regarding the use of ICT in schools (t = -2,436, p = .020), and developed computational problem-solving skills (χ2(2) = 9.000, p = 0,011). These findings have the potential to provide evidence on how computational problem-solving skills can be integrated into science teacher education programs.