Informatics in Education

This research discusses the use of a gamified web platform for studying software modeling with Unified Modeling Language (UML). Although UML is constantly being improved and studied, many works show that there is difficulty in teaching and learning the subject, due to the complexity of its concepts and the students' cognitive difficulties with abstraction. There are challenges for instructors to find different pedagogical strategies to teach modeling. The platform proposed allowed students to complement their UML knowledge in an environment with game elements. From the results, it can be concluded that the platform obtained great acceptance and satisfaction of use. Most of the students participating in the research were satisfied with the usability of the platform, reporting a feeling of contribution of the tool to studying the content, in addition to pointing out the satisfaction of using gamification as a pedagogical strategy.

As the number of software vulnerabilities discovered increases, the industry is facing difficulties to find specialists to cover the vacancies for security software developers. Considering relevant teaching and learning theories, along with existing approaches in software security education, we present the pedagogic rationale and the concrete implementation of a course on security protocol development that integrates formal methods for security research into the teaching practice. A novelty of the framework is the adoption of a conceptual model aligned with the level of abstraction used for the symbolic (high-level) representation of cryptographic and communication primitives. This is aimed not only at improving skills in secure software development, but also at bridging the gap between the formal representation and the actual implementation, making formal methods and tools more accessible to students and practitioners.

This paper introduces constructivist dialogue mapping (CDM), a new type of concept mapping. CDM encodes what people learn during a non-goal directed learning activity. CDM is a practical means to outline the mini theories users fluidly construct as they explore open-ended learning environments. To demonstrate the method, in this paper we use CDM to track how two modelers elaborate understandings during use of a constructionist learning game, Ant Adaptation. Using the method, we show how two users contest and construct their idea of self-organization in ant colonies. The method is rooted in constructionism, constructivism, concept mapping, and conceptual change.

Blended learning is becoming an attractive model in higher education as new innovative information technologies are becoming increasingly available. However, just blending face-to-face learning with information technologies cannot provide effective teaching and efficient solutions for learning. To be successful, blended learning must rely on solid learning theory and pedagogical strategies. In addition, there is a need for a design-based research approach to explore blending learning through successive cycles of experimentations, where the shortcomings of each cycle are identified, redesigned, and reevaluated. This paper reports on a study conducted on a blended learning model in Java programming at the introductory level. It presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the model and its implications for the learning of introductory computer programming.

This article presents an approach to using open-source tools and open-source projects to add realistic and practical examples to a course on software design in a professional master's program of software engineering. Students are encouraged to use object-oriented, open-source software projects available on the Internet, and to analyze their design attributes using open-source tools, to hopefully improve their designs using documented design patterns and other design strategies. The proposed approach provides a variety of realistic examples for study, which can vary from semester to semester, without the instructor having to prepare complicated realistic examples or to rely on over-simplified examples in textbooks. Because the course and the approach are relatively new, a quantifiable assessment of the pedagogical approach has not been presented. However, the argument is made that realistic examples provide for better learning, and evidence is provided to show the feasibility of the approach. The instructor's role is more of a mentor than a traditional teacher, as every open-source project is different from a design perspective.