Informatics in Education

Although Machine Learning (ML) has already become part of our daily lives, few are familiar with this technology. Thus, in order to help students to understand ML, its potential, and limitations and to empower them to become creators of intelligent solutions, diverse courses for teaching ML in K-12 have emerged. Yet, a question less considered is how to assess the learning of ML. Therefore, we performed a systematic mapping identifying 27 instructional units, which also present a quantitative assessment of the students’ learning. The simplest assessments range from quizzes to performance-based assessments assessing the learning of basic ML concepts, approaches, and in some cases ethical issues and the impact of ML on lower cognitive levels. Feedback is mostly limited to the indication of the correctness of the answers and only a few assessments are automated. These results indicate a need for more rigorous and comprehensive research in this area.

Although Machine Learning (ML) is integrated today into various aspects of our lives, few understand the technology behind it. This presents new challenges to extend computing education early to ML concepts helping students to understand its potential and limits. Thus, in order to obtain an overview of the state of the art on teaching Machine Learning concepts in elementary to high school, we carried out a systematic mapping study. We identified 30 instructional units mostly focusing on ML basics and neural networks. Considering the complexity of ML concepts, several instructional units cover only the most accessible processes, such as data management or present model learning and testing on an abstract level black-boxing some of the underlying ML processes. Results demonstrate that teaching ML in school can increase understanding and interest in this knowledge area as well as contextualize ML concepts through their societal impact.

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of the penetration of mobile technology through all strata of society. Mobile technologies including cell phones, tablets, and even some e-readers are used for surfing the web, running apps, reading email, posting to social media, conducting banking transactions, etc. This liberation from desktop and laptop machines and from the requirements of a specific geographic location raises concerns regarding the problems and challenges of maintaining security while traversing cyberspace. The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the attitudes, behaviors, and security practices of business students using mobile devices to access online resources. One group of students surveyed received no specific training regarding mobile security while a second group was surveyed following the completion of an online training program. Results show no significant difference in the security practices of the two groups, indicating that commercially available security training programs are largely inefficacious with respect to modifying student behavior and that additional research on training efficacy is needed.

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.

The growing amount of information in the world has increased the need for computerized classification of different objects. This situation is present in higher education as well where the possibility of effortless detection of similarity between different study courses would give the opportunity to organize student exchange programmes effectively and facilitate curriculum management and development. This area which currently relies on manual time-consuming expert activities could benefit from application of smartly adapted machine learning technologies. Data in this problem domain is complex leading to inability for automatic classification approaches to always reach the desired result in terms of classification accuracy. Therefore, our approach suggests an automated/semi-automated classification solution, which incorporates both machine learning facilities and interactive involvement of a domain expert for improving classification results. The system's prototype has been implemented and experiments are carried out. This interactive classification system allows to classify educational data, which often comes in unstructured or semi-structured, incomplete and/or insufficient form, thus reducing the number of misclassified instances significantly in comparison with the automatic machine learning approach.