Informatics in Education

Spark, one of the products offered by MyQ (formerly Plethora), is a game-based platform meticulously designed to introduce students to the foundational concepts of computer science. By navigating through logical challenges, users delve into topics like abstraction, loops, and graph patterns. Setting itself apart from its counterparts, Spark boasts an innovative formal language and a rich set of features. Unlike traditional platforms, Spark emphasizes computational problem solving over programming syntax, making it accessible to learners of all levels. With progressively challenging levels and an intuitive graphical interface, students engage in problem solving, content creation, and collaboration within the MyQ community. Using Spark makes it less probable for students to utilize generative AI (GAI) to solve challenges, thereby sparing teachers the struggle of assessing tasks that might have been accomplished using GAI.

This paper presents the first experiences of the use of an online open-source repository with programming exercises. The repository is independent of any specific teaching approach. Students can search for and select an exercise that trains the programming concepts that they want to train and that only uses the programming concepts they already know. Then, they can submit their solutions and get automatic feedback from the system. We analyzed quantitatively how students used the system by inspecting the logged actions of the students using the system. We also did a qualitative analysis by interviews, to find out how the students appreciated the use of the repository and to get feedback for improvements. We focused on how students select exercises as finding the exercise that fulfills the training needs of a student is the innovative part of our repository.

In this study, effectiveness of a computer science course at the secondary school level is investigated through a holistic approach addressing the dimensions of instructional content design, development, implementation and evaluation framed according to ADDIE instructional design model where evaluation part constituted the research process for the current study. The process has initiated when the computer science curriculum had major revisions in order to provide in-service teachers with necessary support and guidance. The study is carried through as a project, which lasted more than one year and both quantitative and qualitative measures were used through a sequential explanatory method approach. The intention was to investigate the whole process in detail in order to reveal the effectiveness of the process and the products. In this regard, not only teachers' perceptions but also students' developments in their perceptions of academic achievement and computational thinking, as well as correlations between the computational thinking sub-factors were investigated. The findings showed that the instructional materials and activities developed within the scope of the study, positively affected the computational thinking and academic achievement of students aged 10 and 12 years old. The teachers' weekly feedbacks regarding application structures and implementation processes were also supported the findings and revealed some more details that will be useful both for instructional designers and teachers.

The goal of this literature study is to give some preliminary answers to the questions that aim to uncover the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of Informatics Education, with focus on Programming. PCK has been defined as the knowledge that allows teachers to transform their knowledge of the subject into something accessible for their students. The core questions to uncover this knowledge are: what are the reasons to teach programming; what are the concepts we need to teach programming; what are the most common difficulties/misconceptions students encounter while learning to program; and how to teach this topic. Some of the answers found are, respectively: enhancing students' problem solving skills; programming knowledge and programming strategies; general problems of orientation; and possible ideal chains for learning computer programming. Because answers to the four questions are in a way not connected with each other, PCK being an unexplored field in Informatics Education, we need research based efforts to study this field.

Mathematical logic is a discipline used in sciences and humanities with different point of view. Although in tertiary level computer science education it has a solid place, it does not hold also for secondary level education. We present a heterogeneous study both theoretical based and empirically based which points out the key role of logic in computer science, computer science education and knowledge representation. We focus on the key contrast of semantics and syntax, the resolution principle as a leading inference technique (giving also interesting non-clausal generalization of the rule). Further we discuss the possibilities of inclusion the non-classical (many-valued) logics in education together with the original generalization of the non-clausal resolution rule into fuzzy logic. The last part describes partial results of the research concerning the secondary education in the Czech Republic especially in the mathematical logic field. The generalization of the presented ideas entails the article.