Despite a growing effort to implement computational thinking (CT) skills in primary schools, little research is reported about what CT skills to teach at what age. Therefore, the research questions that guide this study read: (1) How is age related to students' success in computational thinking tasks? (2) How are computational thinking tasks perceived by students? (3) How do students' experience learning with respect to computational thinking? 200 primary school students between the age of 6 and 12 participated in this study. These students got introduced to two CT subjects: abstraction and decomposition. We found that age seems to be related with these concepts, with an interaction effect for gender in the abstraction task. No differences found between young and older students in the constructs perceived difficulty, cognitive load, and flow indicate that young primary school students can engage in learning these CT skills.
The paper focuses on the parallels, which are rooted in the simultaneous development of mathematics and informatics. Both mathematics and informatics are based on problem-solving. However, the approaches to determining problems, solution techniques and interpretation of results are different. The paper shows different approaches of mathematics and informatics for solving a simple problem from the informatics competition. It was presented for students, who would be future informatics teachers, and it has become the beginning of the discovery of unexpected relationships and rules' chain, the source of successive tasks, and various methods of their solution. The paper brings the results of the constructivist teaching of students in the form of a fictional interview of mathematician and informatician. Fictional cooperation of a mathematician and an informatician in analysing and solving problems will allow for a detailed analysis and comparison of both fields, which will lead to determining both common and different elements.
The teaching-learning methodology adopted in the Introduction to Computer Science classes may be a process that makes it difficult to understand the principles of programming language for undergraduate students in Computer Science and related areas, generating high failure and course drop out rates. This paper presents an analysis of the results obtained in the Introduction to Computer Science classes taught in Computer Science and Engineering courses at University of Brasília (UnB). The evaluation questionnaire answered by the undergraduate students in 2017 was analyzed, a validation was performed, and we checked the level of students satisfaction in relation to the evaluated subject and the association among the level of satisfaction, the percentage of practical activities of the discipline, student performance and the level of absenteeism.
The rapid development of new technologies requires a new set of skills from all users in operating, using, and maintaining digitised environments. Curriculum design in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) undergoes a rapid change as technological achievements do influence education.
The aim of the article was to present research results on the mappings of learning outcomes to taxonomies to evolve from requirement-based assessment to competency-based assessment. The research was carried out on the problem-based learning (PBL) module. The article presents a novel PBL model design with activities and evaluation schema. The developed model could be used to guide the curricula design of information technologies for generic competencies, and to foster skills essential for the future ICT sector.
Learning Object (LO) is one of the main research topics in the e-learning community in the recent years. In this context, granularity is a key factor for LO reuse. This paper presents a methodology to define the learning objects granularity in the computing area as well as a case study in software testing. We carried out five experiments to evaluate the learning potential from the produced learning objects, as well as to demonstrate the possibility of LO reuse. The results show that LOs promote the understanding and application of the concepts. In addition, the set of LOs identified through the proposed methodology allowed its reuse in different contexts.
The objective of this article is to present the development and evaluation of dETECT (Evaluating TEaching CompuTing), a model for the evaluation of the quality of instructional units for teaching computing in middle school based on the students' perception collected through a measurement instrument. The dETECT model was systematically developed and evaluated based on data collected from 16 case studies in 13 different middle school institutions with responses from 477 students. Our results indicate that the dETECT model is acceptable in terms of reliability (Cronbach's alpha ?=.787) and construct validity, demonstrating an acceptable degree of correlation found between almost all items of the dETECT measurement instrument. These results allow researchers and instructors to rely on the dETECT model in order to evaluate instructional units and, thus, contribute to their improvement and to direct an effective and efficient adoption of teaching computing in middle school.
The paper considers a problem of financial resource allocation in a higher education institution. The basic financial management instruments and the multi-stage cost minimization model created are described involving financial instruments to constraints. Both societal and institutional factors that determine the costs of educating students are examined and involved into the model, too. A financial flow planning model of an education institution (e.g., university) has been created, using two-stage or four-stage stochastic programming algorithms, with easily selected education institution's accounting data. The created model has been adapted to solve the two-stage and multi-stage financial flow optimization problem of the branch of university, and the obtained results of two-stage and multi-stage tasks have been compared. A mixed integer programming algorithm, realized in the model using CPLEX Studio 126 for optimization, can be flexibly adapted for practical needs of financial planning of education institutions.
Context: concept Maps (CMs) enable the creation of a schematic representation of a domain knowledge. For this reason, CMs have been applied in different research areas, including Computer Science. Objective: the objective of this paper is to present the results of a systematic mapping study conducted to collect and evaluate existing research on CMs initiatives in Computer Science. Method: the mapping study was performed by searching five electronic databases. We also performed backward snowballing and manual search to find publications of researchers and research groups that accomplished these studies. Results: from the mapping study, we identified 108 studies addressing CMs initiatives in different subareas of Computer Science that were reviewed to extract relevant information to answer a set of research questions. The mapping shows an increasing interest in the topic in recent years and it has been extensively investigated due to support in teaching and learning. Conclusions: based on our results we conclude that the use of CMs as an educational tool has been widely accepted in Computer Science.
Although widely used, the SCORM metadata model for content aggregation is difficult to be used by educators, content developers and instructional designers. Particularly, the identification of contents related with each other, in large repositories, and their aggregation using metadata as defined in SCORM, has been demanding efforts of computer science researchers in pursuit of the automation of this process. Previous approaches have extended or altered the metadata defined by SCORM standard. In this paper, we present experimental results on our proposed methodology which employs ontologies, automatic annotation of metadata, information retrieval and text mining to recommend and aggregate related content, using the relation metadata category as defined by SCORM. We developed a computer system prototype which applies the proposed methodology on a sample of learning objects generating results to evaluate its efficacy. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and effective to produce the expected results.
The management of contemporary software projects is unfeasible without the support of a Project Management (PM) tool. In order to enable the adoption of PM tools in practice, teaching its usage is important as part of computer education. Aiming at teaching PM tools, several approaches have been proposed, such as the development of educational PM tools. However, such approaches are typically limited with respect to content coverage and instructional support. In this context, an important technique is the provision of instructional feedback, which is essential in order to help the students to learn based on the evaluation of their own actions. In order to take advantage of this technique, this article proposes its employment in an Instructional Unit, being integrated into the PM tool dotProject+, providing automated feedback based on the project plan being developed with the tool. This technique has been evaluated through a series of case studies.