Informatics in Education

The paper addresses the problem of fragmentation of the communities involved in the design of digital media for education. It draws on the experience gained at the Educational Technology Lab in the design of Logo-based microworlds with three different platforms respectively based on component computing, 3D game engines and 3D navigation with a GIS. In this paper I use the term half-baked to describe a microworld which is explicitly designed to engage its users with changing it as the main aspect of their activity. I discuss this kind of microworld as a tool for integrated design involving people with diverse expertise and/or roles to communicate. These kinds of microworlds implicitly exist within the community, but they can be explicitly designed mediated and put to use in the role of facilitators for integrated design and development to enable a growing communication amongst researchers, technicians, teachers and students. A template for presenting microworlds which was constructed through the experience with four such integrated communities is used to describe for each respective case the design principles, the affordances, the histories of development and the variety of emergent microworlds.

This study focuses on the use of innovative Tablet PC technology in learning and teaching mathematics. Specifically the effects of incorporating Tablet PC technology in pre-service teachers' mathematics education were analyzed. The significant impact of technology use in mathematics education was assessed by evaluating and comparing students' final project and course grades. Grade performance of two groups of students was compared. One group was the treatment group where students extensively used Tablet PCs to work on mathematical investigations and explorations and to create lesson plans and animated games through PowerPoint presentations. The other group was the control group where students worked on identical mathematics investigations and created lesson plans without utilizing any technology. The outcome shows that the technology enhanced group achieved significantly higher scores than the control group. This outcome indicates a greater improvement in the treatment group's understanding of mathematical content versus that of the control group's.

LOGO has been evolving in incremental steps for 40 years. This has resulted in steady progress but some regions of the space of all programming languages for children cannot be reached without passing through unacceptable intermediate designs. What are the ultimate aims of LOGO? What criteria and aesthetics should be used in determining which areas of the design space are most promising? What would the ideal programming language look like? Would a family of special-purpose languages be more effective than a single language?

A reversible sequence of steps from the specification of the algorithm and the mathematical definition of the recurrent solution through the recursive procedure, the tail recursive procedure and finally to the iteration procedure, is shown. The notation for analysing recursive function execution as well as modified flow charts of an algorithm to identify the differences between the iteration and the tail recursion are proposed. All the procedures are written in Logo, so the lists are used as the data structure. Transformation from the recursive procedure to the iterative procedure and vice versa can be shown in such a way in every language in which the recursion is allowed. All examples are one-recursion-call examples and all except one are the functions of discrete mathematics.

Two years ago the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University makes a decision to design a new series of Logo-based courses which make use of the modern technology. The pedagogical component of the challenge is to design a multidisciplinary course suitable for students with different skills and interests. From a development perspective the challenge is to build an entirely new one. And finally the course must be attractive regardless of the seriousness and complexity of the topics included in it.

We investigate the possibility to apply a known machine learning algorithm of Q-learning in the domain of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is important in this problem domain to have algorithms that learn their optimal values in a rather short time expressed in terms of the iteration number. The problem domain is a VLE in which an agent plays a role of the teacher. With time it moves to different states and makes decisions which regarding action to choose for moving from current state to the next state. Some actions taken are more efficient than others. The transition process through the set of states ends in a final (goal) state, one which provides the agent with the largest benefit possible. The best course of action is to reach the goal state with the maximum return available. This paper introduces a way of definition of a rewards matrix, which allows the maximum tolerance for the changes of a discounted reward value to be achieved. It also proposes way of an application of the Q-learning that allows a teaching policy to exist, which maps the situation in the learning environment.

This paper describes a didactical Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE)-tool that was developed for use within the context of a course in object-oriented domain modelling. In particular, the tool was designed to address several inconveniences that challenge the realisation of the course objectives: the number of students enrolled does not allow for individual feedback (a); students have little opportunity to build a concrete information system, therefore they fail to predict the consequences of the different choices when building a conceptual model (b); students lack examples and practice on how to convert a conceptual model into a concrete information system (c); at the beginning of the course students have very different levels of prior knowledge leading to major differences in motivation and learning outcomes (d).

Reflective practice is considered to play an important role in students' learning as they encounter difficult material. However, students in this situation sometimes do not behave reflectively, but in less productive and more problematic ways. This paper investigates how educators can recognize and analyze students' confusion, and determine whether students are responding reflectively or defensively. Qualitative data for the investigation comes from an upper-level undergraduate software engineering and design course that students invariably find quite challenging. A phenomenological analysis of the data, based on Heidegger's dynamic of rupture, provides useful insight to students' experience. A comparison between that approach and a sampling of classic sources in scholarship on learning, reflectiveness, and defensiveness has implications for teaching and education research in software design - and more generally. In addition, a clearer understanding of the concepts presented in this paper should enable faculty to bring a more sophisticated analysis to student feedback, and lead to a more informed and productive interpretation by both instructor and administration.

Although there are many high-quality models for program and evaluation planning, these models are often too intensive to be used in situations when time and resources are scarce. Additionally, there is little added value in using an elaborate and expensive program and evaluation planning procedure when programs are small or are planned to be short-lived. To meet the need for simplified models for program and evaluation planning, we describe a model that includes only what we consider to be the most essential outcomes-based program and evaluation planning steps: (a) how to create a logic model that shows how the program is causally expected to lead to outcomes, (b) how to use the logic model to identify the goals and objectives that the program is responsible for; (c) how to formulate measures, baselines, and targets from the goals and objectives; and (d) how to construct program activities that align with program targets.

A high quality review of the distance learning literature from 1992-1999 concluded that most of the research on distance learning had serious methodological flaws. This paper presents the results of a small-scale replication of that review. A sample of 66 articles was drawn from three leading distance education journals. Those articles were categorized by study type, and the experimental or quasi-experimental articles were analyzed in terms of their research methodologies. The results indicated that the sample of post-1999 articles had the same methodological flaws as the sample of pre-1999 articles: most participants were not randomly selected, extraneous variables and reactive effects were not controlled for, and the validity and reliability of measures were not reported.