Informatics in Education

The definition of effective pedagogical strategies for coaching and tutoring students according to their needs is one of the most important issues in Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems (AIES). The use of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model allows the system to learn automatically how to teach to each student individually, only based on the acquired experience with other learners with similar characteristics, like a human tutor does. The application of this artificial intelligence technique, RL, avoids to define the teaching strategies by learning action policies that define what, when and how to teach. In this paper we study the performance of the RL model in a DataBase Design (DBD) AIES, where this performance is measured on number of students required to acquire efficient teaching strategies.

Every repetitive process encapsulates a regularity pattern, which may be expressed as an invariant assertion. Invariants embody implicit, insightful properties that characterize the execution of programming statements. Due to their implicit nature, invariants may be less apparent to algorithmic problem solvers. Yet, invariants are essential for designing correct and efficient algorithms. This paper illustrates the essential role of invariants, and examines whether novices tend to look for invariant properties during their algorithmic problem solving. The paper presents a study in which two novel algorithmic challenges were displayed to a group of motivated, novice students. Student solutions to these challenges demonstrate an operational reasoning approach, which does not capture the essence of the problems at hand, and yields non-satisfying results. Some solutions were incorrect, others were inefficient, and some had no convincing justification. These results, and the correct and efficient solutions to both challenges illuminate the importance of assertional reasoning and the fundamental role of invariants.

This paper describes steps taken towards introducing Web-based educational technology in teaching demography at the university level. Traditionally, demography is taught by giving lectures to the students, who are then expected to study from textbooks and exercise in demographic calculus. Some students find this way of learning monotonous and exhausting, hence their motivation gradually drops. Modern learning technology can help prevent such a situation, at least to an extent. Of course, using any technology to support teaching and learning requires representing essential parts of the domain knowledge with that technology first. The paper presents initial results in building such a knowledge infrastructure for Web-based education (WBE) in the domain of demography.

To apply Extended Entity Relationship Model (EER) is a good method for representing requirements on information systems, because of its high level of abstraction. Although it is very close to the user, it is not so trivial when some constructs, such as higher order relationships, are used. This paper describes the characterisation and several important results of an experiment performed at our university in order to show some of the difficulties found when novice students and practitioners use ternary relationships. Some special topics in identifying ternary relationships such as the importance of the domain of text and the intersection data are also investigated. In order to guide and help users in the design task, these results are introduced in PANDORA Case Tool, a research project which tries to serve as a methodological assistance tool.

Since establishment of World Wide Web a number of e-learning tools and resources have been created and successfully used in every educational institution. Established standards such as IMS and SCORM currently provide means for e-learning asset portability and reuse. Most of such implementations have a database back-end. Data from such a back-end RDBMS can be exported into IMS XML and used by standard compliant e-learning platforms. After reviewing facilitating technologies and similar solutions authors state that there is no viable solution for database to IMS conversion. Next they present own DB-to-IMS XML conversion method. As a conversion example authors introduce and use own developed EduMMDB - a set of e-learning tools with database back-end. After presenting conversion tool ELSTD authors summarize gained experience and possibilities of improvement.

Distance learning involves a lot of work of human assistants. These assistants need to be connected for answering student doubts and questions. Intelligent agents can do part of this repetitive work because they can observe students interacting with educational courses, detect learning troubles of these students, and then suggest them some way for overcoming those troubles. However, a design problem appears with this promised possibility: how to connect educational applications with these agents. This paper presents a solution to this problem, in which both the capture of student's intentions and agent intervention for helping students are specified. These two architectural design points are defined as connection points. The first connection point is named student intentions. Student intentions define situations in which agents might help. This connection point depends on the user interface of the educational application that students are using; the agent needs to know the gestures that students could do for interpreting their intentions. The second connection point is named agent interventions. Agent interventions define the context in which agent might assist and the type of help that might give, like a suggestion or a warning. This solution is introduced in the context of one specific application for distance learning named SAVER, which is used for exemplifying each architectural design point.

Dynamic geometry software has been accused of contributing to an empirical approach to school geometry. However, used appropriately it can provide students with a visually rich environment for conjecturing and proving. Year 8 students who were novices with regard to geometric proof were able to exploit the features of Cabri Geometry II to assist them in formulating and proving in the context of Cabri simulations of mechanical linkages.

The use of informatics in education has provided many contributions to the understanding of teaching and learning processes. First, it made possible the distinction between instructionism, seen as transmission of information, and constructionism, as the process of knowledge construction that takes place when a learner produces a meaningful product through the use of computers.

A constructivism-based approach to teach the object-oriented (OO) programming paradigm in introductory computer courses was developed and used for several years. A multi-entity system from every-day life was adopted, to exploit the novice programmer's existing knowledge and build on it the OO conceptual framework. A sequence of assignments has been designed and developed to allow students exposed to this approach to experiment with Java programming and see how the OO conceptual framework is implemented. In this paper, this sequence of assignments is presented, discussed and evaluated in the context of the defined approach. The set of assignments that is based on a software-engineering-centered view and more precisely on a design-first approach, comes with the description of the strategy and graded hints that lead students to the final solution. Although it was first implemented as supplementary material, it quickly became the core component of the course.

Distance learning programs have rapidly increased during the past few decades. In fall 2000 the University of Joensuu started to offer distance Computer Science (CS) studies to the high school students in surrounding rural areas of Joensuu. In this program high school students study the first year's university level CS studies over the web simultaneously with their regular high school studies. We describe the creation process of our virtual curriculum which is based the so-called Candle scheme. The Candle scheme search the most essential principles needed in on-line course design, supporting a student locally in her authentic learning needs via electronic tools in a light way. With the Candle scheme we have successfully focused in our design process on the most essential parts of the virtual study process. Our experiences of the Candle scheme in the creation process of the on-line CS program during years 2000-2002 indicate that the scheme is the functional one and expandable to other contexts as well.