Informatics in Education

Programming is one of the most important aspects of a Computing course. Teaching programming is a challenging task due to a number of factors, ranging from lack of student problem solving skills to different teaching methods. This paper focuses on Maltese Computing teachers’ perspectives about the difficulties encountered when teaching programming to secondary school students in order to determine whether introducing programming to secondary school students through creating mobile-based games is an effective method to teach programming constructs. A resource pack consisting of various activities using MIT App Inventor 2 was created which incorporated constructivist approaches to teaching. This resource pack was reviewed by the teachers and their feedback was collected by means of a case study. The teachers agreed that developing mobile-based games would be highly stimulating to their students but there were uncertainties how this would affect students with different learning abilities and due to a general lack of computational thinking and problem-solving skills by most students.

Motivating students of the Nintendo generation for Computer Science can only be achieved by providing them with an exiting and fresh CS1 course. The article describes the experience of redesigning the introductory programming course at ETH Zurich and shows how the combination of state-of-the-art visualizations with open project assignments enlivens students' enthusiasm for programming. It shows the setup and the involved libraries, provides example applications that were built in the course, and presents the data gathered in the evaluation of the open assignment.

The scope of the paper is animation facilities of computer algebra systems (CAS). Animation offers opportunities for visualization of complex mathematical concepts, provides convincing demonstration of ideas and influence of quantities or parameters, helps to generate hypothesis, encourages exploration. Animation can be used to demonstrate many mathematical concepts that are difficult to explain verbally or to show with static pictures. Using animation allows students to explore, experiment and visualize mathematics as a dynamic process. But CAS creates only opportunities. The problem remains for users to realize this potential. So features of CAS such as ease of use, convenience of procedures are important for teaching and learning. The paper deals with animation features of the three most popular CAS - Maple, Matlab, Mathcad and their usefulness in education. The results of practical use of the three CAS in teaching animation procedures are discussed and students' opinion about animation tools of CAS is presented.