This paper presents results of a questionnaire focused on investigating students' confidence and behavioral intention in the area of programming, particularly that of structures, problem solving, and programming commands (Conditional - Loop). Responses from 116 1st year students regarding informatics were used. The results indicate that the engagement with programming logic yields a positive impact on students' confidence and acceptance. In addition, all the measured factors are related relatively strongly. Our findings demonstrate that students' prior direction (at Lyceum) has a significant impact on their Confidence for using Programming Commands (CPC) and Confidence for using Data Structures (CDS); however, prior direction does not have any impact on learners Problem Solving Confidence (PSC) and Behavioral Intention (BI) for programming. In the conclusion, several issues regarding the courses of programming are discussed.
Over the last decade there is an intensive discussion within the Information Systems (IS) and Informatics community about the characteristics and identity of the discipline. Simultaneously with the discussion, there is an ongoing debate on essential skills and capabilities of IS and Business Informatics graduates as well as the profile of IS programs. With this paper we recognize the need for different IS perspectives resulting in diverse study profiles. We developed a framework for structuring information systems study programs and characterized some of the differences in study programs. The results from this study are based on a survey and workshops with domain exerts, both from academia and practice. The descriptive results from the survey are presented, and show the diversity of study programs, both on master and bachelor level. As an example for an IS profile we summarize a reference structure for Business Informatics study programs, which aims to provide guidance for curriculum development and to stimulate further debate on IS curriculum development.
Teaching object-oriented programming (OOP) is related to many difficulties. There is no single view on their causes among the university teachers. The results of applying various methods of teaching - with early or late introduction of the objects, are controversial too.
This work presents the results of a study designed to analyze and classify the difficulties encountered in the teaching of OOP in Bulgarian universities as well as the possibilities for dealing with them. Two viewpoints have been considered - of lecturers and of students. The issues under consideration are: when and what should be studied, what should be stressed, what languages and environments should be used, what examples are the most suitable, and what educational goals the programming courses should achieve.
Our investigation was aimed also to confirm or cast aside our suppositions that important aspects in teaching/learning OOP are being underestimated: great attention is being paid to the data in a class at the expence of the behavior of the objects in a program; more than necessary is being stressed onto the syntactic peculiarities in defining classes and objects without detailed clarification why they are needed; the auxiliary didactic tools that are being used are insufficient.