Informatics in Education

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.

Our future society will be different from that we have known in the last fifty years. Futurists foresee that in the near couple decades the world's community will traverse through a period of rapid technological innovations that will change the foundations of society as we used to know it (Tapscott, 1997; Wallace, 1999; Borgmann; 1999). Changes will engulf all aspects of life (Gleick, 1999). These changes will have great impact on society, work, culture and art. People will have to innovate or evaporate (Higgins, 1995). They will have to adapt continuously to never-ending permutations and engage in a never-ending adaptation.

This article analyses the field of research on information and communication technology (ICT) in education. It reviews the results of ICT researches carried out in the world. First, the article presents the retrospective of researches on ICT implementation into education. Summarizing them, it reviews main research findings in five areas of ICT implementation: 1) the impact of ICT use on students achievements and attitudes; 2) the impact of ICT use on teachers; 3) the effect of teachers' factors and instructional methods on ICT efficiency; 4) the influence of infrastructure and organizational factors on ICT efficiency; 5) the effect of specific software design features. Then, the paper reviews the main recent and future directions of researches on ICT in education, in the world. Finally, it shortly reviews the most important future directions of ICT research and development in Lithuania. The article concludes that in spite of numerous ICT studies worldwide the national research and experiments have to be carried out in order to implement ICT in an appropriate for Lithuania and efficient way.

Many factors influence teaching nowadays. Numbers of students are increasing, some students pay for studies and require more flexible teaching, more students have access to Internet, the learning material is changing rapidly (especially of subjects, related to information technologies), publishing industry is slow and expensive. All that stimulates usage of modern technologies in education. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is one of the forms of e-learning. They open new ways of teaching and communication such as management of online learning, course delivery mechanism, communication and assessment tools, student tracking, access to electronic resources, etc. All these means correspond to the needs of contemporary teachers and students. VLEs have primarily been used for distance education but they are being used increasingly as supplement of traditional classroom based education. The author is interested in this latter aspect of VLEs.