Informatics in Education

Distance Learning has enabled educational practices based on digital platforms, generating massive amounts of data. Several initiatives use this data to identify dropout contexts, mainly providing teacher support about student behavior. Approaches such as Active Methodologies are known as having good potential to involve and motivate students. This article presents a systematic mapping aiming to identify current Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics methods. Besides, we identify Active Methodologies’ application to mitigate dropout in Distance Learning. We evaluated 668 papers published from January 2015 to March 2020. The results indicate a growing application of Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics to identify and mitigate students’ abandonment in Distance Learning. However, studies with Active Methodologies to minimize dropout and enhance student permanence are scarce. Some works suggest Active Methods as a possible complement of Learning Analytics in dropout.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of digital concept cartoons and maps in eliminating misconceptions of secondary school students. The research was conducted with 67 students who were studying at three different branches of 7th grade of secondary school. The research was conducted according to semi-experimental design with pre-test, post-test control group, and quantitative and qualitative research methods (mixed pattern) were used together. Accordingly, the mathematics classes in the Study Group I were conducted by the DCC method and the mathematics courses in the Study Group II were conducted by the DCM, and the mathematics courses in the control group were processed by traditional teaching method. In order to determine the students’ misconceptions before and after the experiment, Misconception Test was used which was applied as Pre-test and Post-test. In addition, students’ opinions and observation processes related to the use of DCC and DCM in mathematics class were included in the experimental process. As a result of the data analysis, there was no statistically significant difference between Study Group I, Study Group II and control group when the results of the Misconception test of the control and study groups were compared. In addition, students stated that the use of DCC and DCM in mathematics course have advantages such as making the courses enjoyable, drawing attention, increasing interest in the course, and visualizing the course topics. In the direction of the findings obtained from the research, various suggestions were made to the teachers and researchers about the use of DCC and DCM in secondary school mathematics courses.

In today’s society, creativity plays a key role, emphasizing the importance of its development in K-12 education. Computing education may be an alternative for students to extend their creativity by solving problems and creating computational artifacts. Yet, there is little systematic evidence available to support this claim, also due to the lack of assessment models. This article presents SCORE, a model for the assessment of creativity in the context of computing education in K-12. Based on a mapping study, the model and a self-assessment questionnaire are systematically developed. The evaluation, based on 76 responses from K-12 students, indicates a high internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.961) and confirmed the validity of the instrument suggesting only the exclusion of 3 items that do not seem to be measuring the concept. As such, the model represents a first step aiming at the systematic improvement of teaching creativity as part of computing education.

This paper presents an innovative educational approach to organizing the out-of-school teaching of programming in middle childhood. The proposed DGBL model includes three distinct educational phases, i.e. learning visual programming, programming and robotics, and programming and electronics. The research was carried out during the school years of 2017–2019. The study sample consists of 329 primary school students from K4 to K10 from the Lodzkie Voivodeship in Poland. The results were obtained from anonymous questionnaires completed by course participants. The answers confirm that the proposed approach helps children to learn the main concepts of computational thinking and programming. The described approach reinforces the essential idea in children that programming, engineering, mathematics and technology are intertwined in the modern world. Moreover, the approach combines and balances practical, methodological and pedagogical issues and is suitably integrated with out-of-school programming education to facilitate the teaching and learning process.

The software industry is not satisfied with the preparation level of newly graduated professionals in Computing undergraduate courses. There is a predominance of traditional approaches to the Software Engineering (SE) teaching which proved to be inefficient, because they focus on the content from the professor´s viewpoint. This research aims to investigate if the use of student-focused approaches in the SE teaching can develop more technical competencies to apply in industry than when traditional approaches are applied. For this, an iterative model has been defined to integrate the main student-focused approaches and a controlled experiment was carried out in four undergraduate courses. The data were collected from structured interviews with students and analyzed using ANOVA. The results showed no significant statistical difference between student-focused and traditional teaching approaches in the development of SE competencies. However, these results were impacted by the motivation and commitment of the experiment students.

Teaching introductory computer programming and choosing the proper tools and programming languages are challenging tasks. Most of the existing tools are not fully integrated into systems to support the teaching-learning processes. The present paper describes the usability evaluation of the Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle (VPL-Moodle) based on a satisfaction questionnaire answered by 37 undergraduate students enrolled in CS1 and CS2 courses and 7 lecturers. Moreover, a heuristic evaluation performed by two specialists is also presented. Results of the descriptive and inferential analysis revealed mainly two things: a) the VPL-Moodle has a low level of usability in all five aspects analyzed by the students: satisfaction, efficiency, learnability, helpfulness, and environment control; and b) lecturers found some difficulties using the VPL-Moodle. A number of suggestions for the improvement of the VPL-Moodle interface are provided based on the findings of the paper.

Emotions can influence cognitive development and are key elements to the teaching-learning process. Positive emotions (e.g., engagement) can improve the ability to solve problems, store information, and make decisions. On the other hand, negative emotions (e.g., boredom) reduce the capacity to process information at a deeper level, preventing learning to become effective. Therefore, students’ emotions must be regulated to hinder negative and to promote positive emotions during learning. To support the choice of the best intervention to regulate individual emotions, this article proposes an algorithm based on simulated data considering different individual performances in solving Algebra exercises. The results suggest that the proposed model has high success rates (over 90%) in the choice of interventions and may be applied in real scenarios.