Informatics in Education

In Poland, talent development is organized mainly outside or alongside the educational system. A large number of privately funded informatics contests and extra-curricular talent development programs for highly motivated students are available. However, traditional competitions also exist including national informatics Olympiads and competitions mainly supported by the Ministry of Education. In particular, we stimulate interest in informatics by organizing the annual nationwide InfoSukces contest. This contest was organized for the first time in 2015 when informatics education in Poland was experiencing difficulties recruiting new students, who were in growing demand on the labor market. The aim of the contest is now to make students aware that the jobs of the future require problem-solving, digital skills, and creative thinking, all of which can be taught through informatics. The contest also provides a platform for a unique series of activities, the goal of which is to support partnerships and knowledge flow between schools and universities. This article provides a case study of the final stage of the InfoSukces contest, which involves the participants developing a “work of art” in the Scratch programming environment. It also presents the holistic method for quantitative evaluation of the students’ creative visual-based programming projects.

Connecting theory and practice in teaching is sometimes difficult, as it requires expensive or delicate equipment, thus limiting the teacher to giving demonstrations in which students are passive participants. Numerical mathematics, as an applied discipline, should be taught on real world examples. By using inexpensive Arduino hardware, we can create simple experiments that are easily reproduced by students. Furthermore, the experiments generate tangible data, which can be processed numerically. The choice of the software used for numerical processing is also an important issue. We present several exercises in numerical mathematics that are based on experiments in electrical engineering with Arduino, and show how to turn them into motivational examples. We also present our experiences in teaching using the developed exercises, as well as some important points and conclusions, which stem from discussions with the participating students and teachers.

There are many important issues in informatics and many agree that algorithms and programming are most important issues that need to be included in informatics education (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012). In this paper, we propose how some of these issues can be easily taught using the notion of a formal system which consists of axioms and inference rules by which theorems can be proved. As is argued in (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012), we can introduce important topics in informatics using puzzle-like examples and students do not need to have prerequisites for learning. The materials presented in this paper have been used in a college-level elective class titled Hypertext and Computability in our university since the fall semester of 2008 and we believe that the contents proposed in this paper can be easily used to teach beginner students without technical backgrounds.

A recent report by the joint Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education emphasizes that: (1) computational thinking is an important ability that all people should possess; (2) informatics-based concepts, abilities and skills are teachable, and must be included in the primary and particularly in the secondary school curriculum. Accordingly, the "2013 Best Practices in Education Award" (organized by Informatics Europe) was devoted to initiatives promoting Informatics Education in Primary and Secondary Schools. In this paper we present one of the winning projects: "Multi-Sensory Informatics Education". We have developed effective multi-sensory methods and software-tools to improve the teaching-learning process of elementary, sorting and recursive algorithms. The technologically and artistically enhanced learning environment we present has also the potential to promote intercultural computer science education and the algorithmic thinking of both science- and humanities-oriented learners.

The first specification for the informatics Matura examination in Poland was published in 2000, and since May 2005 the examination has been organized every year. This article includes some reflections and remarks about formulating examination tasks and pupils' difficulties in solving the tasks collected by the author during her work as an examiner. In the article, four examination tasks from 2008 are considered. These remarks could be useful especially for informatics teachers.