Informatics in Education

Prior programming knowledge of students has a major impact on introductory programming courses. Those with prior experience often seem to breeze through the course. Those without prior experience see others breeze through the course and disengage from the material or drop out. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that novice student programming behavior can be modeled as a Markov process. The resulting transition matrix can then be used in machine learning algorithms to create clusters of similarly behaving students. We describe in detail the state machine used in the Markov process and how to compute the transition matrix. We compute the transition matrix for 665 students and cluster them using the k-means clustering algorithm. We choose the number of cluster to be three based on analysis of the dataset. We show that the created clusters have statistically different means for student prior knowledge in programming, when measured on a Likert scale of 1-5.

In a previous publication we examined the connections between high-school computer science (CS) and computing higher education. The results were promising—students who were exposed to computing in high school were more likely to take one of the computing disciplines. However, these correlations were not necessarily causal. Possibly those students who took CS courses, and especially high-level CS courses in high school, were already a priori inclined to pursue computing education. This uncertainty led us to pursue the current research. We aimed at finding those factors that induced students to choose CS at high school and later at higher-education institutes. We present quantitative findings obtained from analyzing freshmen computing students' responses to a designated questionnaire. The findings show that not only did high-school CS studies have a major impact on students’ choice whether to study computing in higher education—it may have also improved their view of the discipline.

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 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) aspires to be a science olympiad alongside such international olympiads in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Informatics as a discipline is well suited to a scientific approach and it offers numerous possibilities for competitions with a high scientific standing. We argue that, in its current form, the IOI fails to be scientific in the way it evaluates the work of the contestants.