Informatics in Education

The paper discusses a certain type of competitions based on distance interaction of a participant with simulation models of concepts from discrete mathematics and computer science. One of them is the “Construct, Test, Explore” (CTE) competition, developed by the authors, the other is the Olympiad in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Informatics (DM&TI). The tasks presented in this paper are generally devoted to the concept of a graph isomorphism. Most of the tasks are verified automatically.

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the coordinated use of Learning Analytics and Computational Ontologies to support educators in the process of academic performance evaluation of students. The aim is to provide a general overview for researchers about the current state of this relationship between Learning Analytics and Ontologies, and how they have been applied in a coordinated way. We selected 31 of a total of 1230 studies related to the research questions. The retrieved studies were analyzed from two perspectives: first, we analyzed the approaches where researchers used Learning Analytics and Ontologies in a coordinated way to describe some Taxonomy of Educational Objectives; In the second perspective, we seek to identify which models or methods have been used as an analytical tool for educational data. The results of this review suggest that: 1) few studies consider that student interactions in the Learning Management System can represent students’ learning experiences; 2) most studies use ontologies in the context of learning object assessment to enable learning sequencing; 3) we did not identify methods of evaluation of academic performance guided by Taxonomies of Educational Objectives; and 4) no studies were identified that report the coordinated use of Learning Analytics and Computational Ontologies, in the context of academic performance monitoring. Thus, we identify future directions of research such as the proposal of a new model of evaluation of academic performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of applications created using a web-based 3D design environment on the spatial visualisation and mental rotation abilities of secondary school students. A total of 63 school students from the sixth grade participated in the study. The researchers applied a mixed research method including both quantitative and qualitative measures. The Spatial Visualisation Test, Mental Rotation Test, and Santa Barbara Solids Test, which concurrently measure spatial orientation and spatial relations, were used as tools to measure the different components of spatial ability prior to and after the treatment application. Following the treatment, a focus group interview using structured questions was conducted. A statistically significant difference showed an increase in all three test scores of the students; also, the students stated that they were satisfied with being able to design and create something new.

As the number of software vulnerabilities discovered increases, the industry is facing difficulties to find specialists to cover the vacancies for security software developers. Considering relevant teaching and learning theories, along with existing approaches in software security education, we present the pedagogic rationale and the concrete implementation of a course on security protocol development that integrates formal methods for security research into the teaching practice. A novelty of the framework is the adoption of a conceptual model aligned with the level of abstraction used for the symbolic (high-level) representation of cryptographic and communication primitives. This is aimed not only at improving skills in secure software development, but also at bridging the gap between the formal representation and the actual implementation, making formal methods and tools more accessible to students and practitioners.

Information Visualisation strategies can be applied in a variety of domains. In the context of temporal networks, i.e., networks in which interactions between individuals occur throughout time, efforts have been conducted to develop visual approaches that allow finding interaction patterns, anomalies, and other behaviours not previously perceived in the data. This paper presents two case studies involving real-world education networks from a primary school and a high school. For this purpose, we used the Massive Sequence View (MSV) layout with the Community-based Node Ordering (CNO) method, two well established approaches for visual analysis of temporal networks. Our results show that the identified patterns involving students/students and students/teachers represent important information to benefit and support decision making about school management and teaching strategies, especially those related to strategic group formation.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown significant progress and its potential is growing. An application area of AI is Natural Language Processing (NLP). Voice assistants incorporate AI by using cloud computing and can communicate with the users in natural language. Voice assistants are easy to use and thus there are millions of devices that incorporates them in households nowadays. Most common devices with voice assistants are smart speakers and they have just started to be used in schools and universities. The purpose of this paper is to study how voice assistants and smart speakers are used in everyday life and whether there is potential in order for them to be used for educational purposes.

The aim of the article is to determine in the studied groups the multiple intelligence distribution defined in the 1980s by Howard Gardner. The research was conducted in three groups of respondents. The first study group was first-year students of computer science, the second was master (2nd degree) students, educationally 4 years older than the first group. Their intelligence distributions were compared with the intelligence distributions of the third group – graduates of the same university, the same field of study after several years of work in positions consistent with their education. Participants filled one of the multiple intelligence tests selected by answering 24 questions. A group of approximately 110 students and approximately 40 IT employees were examined. As there were statistically justified differences in several significant sub intelligences, a discussion was held on the forms of educational impact on student development paths. The research was carried out in conditions of full voluntary participation in the test and on the basis of self-assessment according to questions suggested in one of the online sources. According to the authors, the results seem interesting, although surprising.