Informatics in Education

Given the emergence of GenAI, students should develop GenAI literacy to promote its benefits and mitigate its drawbacks. However, many studies focus on enhancing their learning experience with GenAI, not understanding GenAI literacy. Two studies are dedicated to GenAI literacy, but they either require additional sessions or focus on overly specific tasks. We integrate GenAI into a data science course and its assessments to specifically promote GenAI literacy for non-computing students. The course design expects students to learn from their direct experience with GenAI, especially regarding GenAI usability, reliability, ethics, and privacy. Students are encouraged to use and acknowledge GenAI for some assessments and to align GenAI-generated programs to their own styles. Our evaluation involving 113 students showed that the course design might help students to understand GenAI characteristics and change their behaviour. Students are unlikely to be involved in GenAI misuse. Further, they align GenAI-generated programs and acknowledge their use. From the educational viewpoint, students could also achieve the course learning objectives.

This article deals with the use of Open Source Software (OSS) at the primary and secondary level of education in Slovenia. The challenges and advantages of using OSS in educational processes are discussed. The main advantages of OSS are: economic freedom, stability, reliability and a possibility of making modifications but - on the other hand - the main problem for schools can be installation and support. The research carried out to determine the use of OSS in schools is described and the results are compared with the results of similar research studies in Germany, Sweden and UK. The results of both surveys show, that Linux and OpenOffice.org are the most popular OSS applications on computer desktops. The most important conclusion (according to our research) is that lack of knowledge prevents a faster introduction of OSS in education.