Informatics in Education

Nowadays, few professionals understand the techniques and testing criteria to systematize the software testing activity in the software industry. Towards shedding some light on such problems and promoting software testing, professors in the area have established Massive Open Online Courses as educational initiatives. However, the main limitation is the professor’s lack of supervision of students. A conversation agent called TOB-STT has been defined in trying to avoid the problem. A previous study introduced TOB-STT; however, it did not analyze its efficacy. This article addresses a controlled experiment that analyzed its efficacy and revealed it was not expressive in its current version. Therefore, we conducted an in-depth analysis to find what caused this result and provided a detailed discussion. The findings contribute to the TOB-STT since the experimental results show that improvements need to be made in the conversational agent before we use it in Massive Open Online Courses.

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.

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.

This paper presents results from three interrelated studies focusing on introducing TRAKLA2 to students taking courses on data structures and algorithms at the University of Turku and \rAbo Akademi University in 2004. Using TRAKLA2 they got acquainted with a completely new system for solving exercises that provided them with automatic feedback and the possibility to resubmit their solutions. Besides comparing the students' learning results, a survey was made with 100 students on the changes in their attitudes towards web-based learning environments. In addition, a usability evaluation was conducted in a human-computer interaction laboratory.

Interaction and feedback are key factors supporting the learning process. Therefore many automatic assessment and feedback systems have been developed for computer science courses during the past decade. In this paper we present a new framework, TRAKLA2, for building interactive algorithm simulation exercises. Exercises constructed in TRAKLA2 are viewed as learning objects in which students manipulate conceptual visualizations of data structures in order to simulate the working of given algorithms. The framework supports randomized input values for the assignments, as well as automatic feedback and grading of students' simulation sequences. Moreover, it supports automatic generation of model solutions as algorithm animations and the logging of statistical data about the interaction process resulting as students solve exercises. The system has been used in two universities in Finland for several courses involving over 1000 students. Student response has been very positive.