The main task of this follow-up study was to describe teachers' expectations, experiences and possible changes in the pedagogical use of ICT. As a part of an ICT development project, three sets of data were gathered from a region in Eastern Finland, by means of questionnaire. A total of 156 teachers of primary and early secondary education returned the questionnaire in 1999, 155 teachers in 2001, and 81 in 2004. The results indicate that teachers have increased their use of various ICT applications (especially data processors, web-browsers, e-mails, and CD-ROMs) both in their private lives and in pedagogical practice. Based on their own self-assessment, the teachers' ICT abilities have improved during the project period. Co-operative activities by means of ICT also increased between colleagues. Although teachers saw ICT as helpful for pupils' learning, some sceptical attitudes emerged as well.
The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) aspires to be a science olympiad alongside such international olympiads in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Informatics as a discipline is well suited to a scientific approach and it offers numerous possibilities for competitions with a high scientific standing. We argue that, in its current form, the IOI fails to be scientific in the way it evaluates the work of the contestants.
In this paper, we describe the major ingredients of the IOI to guide further discussions. By presenting the results of an extensive analysis of two IOI competition tasks, we hope to create an awareness of the urgency to address the shortcomings. We offer some suggestions to raise the scientific quality of the IOI.
Mongolia started using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in secondary education relatively late. The computer training and informatics has been included as a subject in the secondary school curriculum in Mongolia since 1988 and in the university curriculum since 1982. This paper presents current situation of informatics education in Mongolia. SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis of Informatics Education in Mongolia, conclusions and future recommendations are also presented.
The International Olympiad in Informatics currently provides a model which is imitated by the majority of contests for secondary school students in Informatics or Computer Science. However, the IOI model can be criticized, and alternative contest models exist. To support the discussion about contests in Computer Science, several dimensions for characterizing and classifying contests are suggested.
The paper describes some possible ways how to improve Olympiads in Informatics. Tasks in Olympiads are small models of programming tasks in software industry and in the limited amount of competition time contestants need to complete several software production phases - coding, testing and debugging. Currently, only coding effort is adequately graded, but grading of other activities may be improved. Ways to involve contestants in overall testing process are investigated and ways to improve solution debugging process are described. Possible scoring schemas are discussed. In International Olympiads tasks with real numbers are quite rare. Possible reasons are investigated and a way how to return such tasks back to competition arena is suggested.
Plagiarism in universities has always been a difficult problem to overcome. Various tools have been developed over the past few years to help teachers detect plagiarism in students' work. By being able to categorize the multitude of plagiarism detection tools, it is possible to estimate their capabilities, advantages and disadvantages. In this article I consider modern plagiarism software solutions, paying attention mostly to desktop systems intended for plagiarism detection in program code. I also estimate the speed and reliability of different plagiarism detection systems that are currently available.
The scope of the paper is animation facilities of computer algebra systems (CAS). Animation offers opportunities for visualization of complex mathematical concepts, provides convincing demonstration of ideas and influence of quantities or parameters, helps to generate hypothesis, encourages exploration. Animation can be used to demonstrate many mathematical concepts that are difficult to explain verbally or to show with static pictures. Using animation allows students to explore, experiment and visualize mathematics as a dynamic process. But CAS creates only opportunities. The problem remains for users to realize this potential. So features of CAS such as ease of use, convenience of procedures are important for teaching and learning. The paper deals with animation features of the three most popular CAS - Maple, Matlab, Mathcad and their usefulness in education. The results of practical use of the three CAS in teaching animation procedures are discussed and students' opinion about animation tools of CAS is presented.
This paper summarizes two studies and the contemporary literature on the design and construction of effective and efficient Computer Based Learning (CBL) environments. There is adequate evidence on Distance Learning environments, however CBL environments provide some special characteristics that separate them from their Distance counterparts, while they have to adhere to educational principles, as they are mainly educational environments. So, firstly these similarities and differences are emphasized under the educational view. Secondly, the contemporary educational research on such environments is provided and the studies made in this area are briefly described. The objective of this paper is to conclude to a set of design and construction guidelines for environments of this kind, as they emerged from the studies and contemporary trends in the field. So, these guidelines are presented and some issues of interest for further research on the domain are discussed.
For many programming tasks we would be glad to have some kind of automatic evaluation process. As an example, most of the programming contests use an automatic evaluation of the contestants' submissions. While this approach is clearly highly efficient, it also has some drawbacks. Often it is the case that the test inputs are not able to ``break'' all flawed submissions. In this article we show that the situation is not pleasant at all - for some programming tasks it is impossible to design good test inputs. Moreover, we discuss some ways how to recognize such tasks, and discuss other possibilities for doing the evaluation. The discussion is focused on programming contests, but the results can be applied for any programming tasks, e.g., assignments in school.
Individuals vary across many dimensions due to the effects of gender-based, personality, and cultural differences. Consequently, programming contests with a limited and restrictive structure (e.g., scoring system, questioning style) are most favourable and attractive to a specific set of individuals with the characteristics that best match this structure. We suggest that a more inclusive and flexible structure will allow contests to be more appealing to a wider range of participants by being less biased towards specific traits. As well, by making contests more broadly appealing, they become better post secondary recruiting tools that can potentially be used to attract under-represented populations to the discipline of computer science. In this paper, we focus on gender-based differences and the effect of a competition's structure on female participants.