Informatics in Education

The future of multimedia technology is guided on how it is utilized. One particular domain that has shown a lot of potential form multimedia use is the education sector. This paper will try to explain the process of development a multimedia tool that will be used to construct educational teaching and learning materials or otherwise known as courseware. The development of this authoring tool will provide the basis for identifying practices that can be use of core multimedia technologies for supplementing educational resources.

Solution of the problem of optimal school scheduling is very important to make the

The computer registration of physical and mechanical quantities gives a lot of possibilities for machine elements and mechanisms research. The advantages of well-organized computer laboratory both technical and methodological are namely: registration and on-line observation of a number of processes with random speed; replacement of high-cost specialized laboratory equipment; mathematical data processing; solving educational problems by modern technologies.

This paper presents results from three interrelated studies focusing on introducing TRAKLA2 to students taking courses on data structures and algorithms at the University of Turku and \rAbo Akademi University in 2004. Using TRAKLA2 they got acquainted with a completely new system for solving exercises that provided them with automatic feedback and the possibility to resubmit their solutions. Besides comparing the students' learning results, a survey was made with 100 students on the changes in their attitudes towards web-based learning environments. In addition, a usability evaluation was conducted in a human-computer interaction laboratory.

This paper examines results from a multiple-choice test given to novice programmers at twelve institutions, with specific focus on annotations made by students on their tests. We found that the question type affected both student performance and student annotations. Classifying student answers by question type, annotation type (tracing, elimination, other, or none), and institution, we found that tracing was most effective for one type of question and elimination for the other, but overall, any annotation was better than none.

Students of proof theory, a branch of formal logic, can benefit from computerized tools. We describe the principles behind one such tool called ProEd. This tool is targeted especially at novice students, and therefore it is designed to support effortless exploratory use. We moreover argue that focusing on root-first proof construction in Sequent proof systems helps attain this effortlessness.

The present paper has two parts. The first part is a trend analysis from the period 1990-2004 and the second part is a cross-sectional analysis from the year 2004. In both parts, the purpose was to find the most common technical skills sought in American job advertisements for software developer positions. Unlike in previous researches, also distributed technology skills were analyzed thoroughly because as a consequence of World Wide Web technology, these skills are required now more often than ten years ago. According to the trend analysis, the mean of the number of required technical skills increased from 3.6 to 7.7, and the technical requirements have changed as more versatile. The proportion of distributed technology skills increased very strongly: from 0% in 1990 to 65.1% in 2004. According to the cross-sectional analysis, the top five skills sought in 2004 were Windows, Java, C++, SQL, and Unix. In addition, implications to computer science education are considered.

In the present paper, a qualitative research of the cognitive skills of experienced software developers is presented. The data for the research was gathered using the Delphi method. The respondents were 11 software developers who have worked at least five years after their graduation. Two questionnaire rounds were conducted. In the first round, the respondents mentioned altogether 32 different skills. In the second round, 10 of the respondents answered and evaluated the difficulty of these 32 skills (e.g., does the skill efficiently differentiate experts from novices). The results are divided into two categories: composition and comprehension. Approximately 40% of the skills were classified into the category ``comprehension.'' For each skill, the evaluated degree of difficulty of the skill is presented. In the category comprehension, skills related to comprehension of a program or a problem as a whole were evaluated as the most difficult.

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students' understanding of software design and software design criteria. Student participants were recruited from two groups: students early in their degree studies and students completing their Bachelor degrees. Computer Science educators were also recruited as a comparison group. The study, including over 300 participants from 21 institutions in 4 countries, aimed to understand characteristics of student-generated software designs, to investigate student recognition of requirement ambiguities, and to elicit students' valuation of key design criteria. The results indicate that with increases in education, students use fewer textual design notations and more graphical and standardized notations and that they become more aware of ambiguous problem specifications. Yet increased educational attainment has little effect on students' valuation of key design characteristics.