Informatics in Education

The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth’s book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught, often with no access to computers.

The choice of programming language for education is an intensely debated topic. On the one hand, the programming language is supposed to be relevant in that its organisation, structures, and paradigms adhere to current standards and best practices in industry and academia. On the other hand, the programming language is expected to be simple, that is, easy to use and, of course, easy to learn. This increasingly means that we need an introduction to concepts shaped by a long history without all the historic baggage.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become hugely popular recently. MOOCs can offer high-quality education for anyone interested and equalize the whole education field. Still, there are different methodologies for running MOOCs. Coming up with the most suitable methodology benefits both students and teachers. In this study, we have limited the methodological focus to observing scheduled and unscheduled instances of similar MOOC courses. While unscheduled MOOC courses can provide flexibility, they also require self-regulated learning strategies for students to succeed. To observe this, we compare the effectiveness of scheduled and unscheduled programming MOOC courses to find the most effective methodology. For this, we compare the pass rates and grade averages of five instances (two unscheduled and three scheduled) of Python and Java programming MOOCs. The results show that while the attendance numbers are higher in the unscheduled versions, in the scheduled instances the pass rate is significantly better, and students’ progression is much swifter. It also seems that the higher proportion of university students enrolled in a MOOC course positively affects the retention rate. Moreover, the students in the recent unscheduled Python version seem to score significantly higher grades than in its scheduled counterpart. Based on our experiments, the scheduled and unscheduled versions complement each other. Hence, we suggest that, whenever feasible, the maximal benefits would be gained if both types of MOOCs are run simultaneously.

Programming is one of the basic subjects in most informatics, computer science mathematics and technical faculties' curricula. Integrated overview of the models for teaching programming, problems in teaching and suggested solutions were presented in this paper. Research covered current state of 1019 programming subjects in 715 study programmes at total of 218 faculties and 143 universities in 35 European countries that were analyzed. It was concluded that while most of the programmes highly support object-oriented paradigm of programming, introductory programming subjects are mainly based on imperative paradigm.

In this article we report about a study to assess Dutch teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge (\small PCK), with special focus on programming as a topic in secondary school Informatics education. For this research, we developed an online research instrument: the Online Teacher \small PCK Analyser (OTPA). The results show that Dutch teachers' \small PCK scores between low and medium. Also we enquired whether there is any relation between teachers' \small PCK and the textbooks they use by comparing the results of this study with those of a previous one in which the \small PCK of textbooks was assessed. The results show that there is no strong relation. Finally, we looked for trends between teachers' \small PCK and their educational backgrounds, as most of the Dutch teachers have a different background than Informatics. The results show that also in this case there is no strong relation.