Informatics in Education

When it comes to mastering the digital world, the education system is more and more facing the task of making students competent and self-determined agents when interacting with digital artefacts. This task often falls to computing education. In the traditional fields of computing education, a plethora of models, guidelines, and principles exist, which help scholars and teachers identify what the relevant aspects are and which of them one should cover in the classroom. When it comes to explaining the world of digital artefacts, however, there is hardly any such guiding model. The ARIadne model introduced in this paper provides a means of explanation and exploration of digital artefacts which help teachers and students to do a subject analysis of digital artefacts by scrutinizing them from several perspectives. Instead of artificially separating aspects which target the same phenomena within different areas of education (like computing, ICT or media education), the model integrates technological aspects of digital artefacts and the relevant societal discourses of their usage, their impacts and the reasons behind their development into a coherent explanation model.

This study aims to explain the relationships between secondary school students' digital literacy, computer programming self-efficacy and computational thinking self-efficacy. The study group consists of 204 secondary school students. A relational survey model was used in the research method and three different data collection tools were used to collect data. The structural equation model was used in data analysis to reveal a model that explains and predicts the relationships between variables. According to the results of the research, it was determined that digital literacy of secondary school students affected their computer programming self-efficacy, digital literacy affected their computational thinking self-efficacy, and computer programming self-efficacy affected their computational thinking self-efficacy. It was also found that digital literacy skills have an indirect effect on secondary students' computational thinking self-efficacy on computational thinking self-efficacy.

In the last years, a growing trend in different educational contexts focused on Computational Thinking (CT) skills acquisition for both in-service teachers and students. But very low attention has been paid to pre-service teachers' education in regards to CT skills. To solve this issue, an empirical experimentation has been carried out with141 Italian pre-service teachers, that attended at a programming course, with the following aims: 1) provide them the main coding concepts by using Scratch 2.0; 2) offer practical advice on how to design educational applications (apps) to be applied into school context; 3) assess their apps by applying an already existing methodology, useful to give them feedback on their programming expertise and CT skills. Empirical findings showed that most of the participants achieved a medium-high level of CT skills, combining both design and programming skills in their school internship. Moreover, they reported a sense of greater self-esteem in teaching practice and a great emotional response from kids.

The aim of this study is to investigate perceptions of parents in Croatia towards advantages and disadvantages of computer use in general as well as their children's computer use and to reveal parents' concerns and opinions about digital technology (DT) education in kindergarten. The paper reports on research findings from one of the large public kindergartens in the capital city of Croatia. A total of 152 parents of the children aged 3 to 7 enrolled at this early childhood education institution filled in the survey. Results show that although being very well equipped with digital technology hardware at home (99% of surveyed parents owns a computer, tablet or smartphone), parents feel anxious and are not always willing to allow their children to use DT. Results of our survey reveal young children's ability to use DT, but they also show that mere possession of DT at home and enabling children to use computers does not guarantee development of computer literacy and/or information literacy skills.

Internet and its services have become inherent element of the lives of young people. Nevertheless, we observe that educational potential, which the Internet offers for supporting learning processes, is acknowledged and exploited only partially. On that account, for several years we have been involved in developing investigative on-line activities, highly popular interactive events among students of the Slovak schools. In this way, as a value-added benefit, we have created unique opportunity for us to study how students behave when solving problems in the technology enhanced learning situations, how they communicate and cooperate in the teams, which competencies they cultivate. For such educational research, we have made use of the thoroughly projected combination of the intervention design and qualitative non-participant unstructured observations - within the framework of the design-based research methodology.