Computers Supported Education

Classroom response systems are widely recognized as an effective tool for providing formative feedback and engaging students, but our research supports the hypothesis that these systems also provide opportunities for improving content retention. This is evidenced by an experiment we conducted on two distinct sections of an introductory course in computer science, wherein large collections of classroom response system questions were presented to different sections at different stages. Questions that were offered immediately after the corresponding material had the express purpose of providing an opportunity for formative feedback, while questions that were presented later were expected to improve content retention. The performance of participants on the corresponding questions of the final examination was then reviewed, and statistical analyses indicate that participants performed better on those questions that corresponded to the classroom response system questions provided for content retention.

In this design-based research project, a learning space management system was developed for the Valteri School Onerva in Central-Finland. The school represents a modern educational environment with open and adaptable learning spaces. The goal was to develop a software to support the stakeholders in organising flexible pedagogical activities and sharing pedagogical practices. To reach this goal, we utilised value-focused thinking as a requirements elicitation method, to identify the objectives that the stakeholders associate with the new environment. In the implementation phase, we organised participatory design workshops, to involve the stakeholders in decision-making, to ensure that the prototype development was proceeding according to their needs. As a result, we elaborate how we utilised value-focused thinking, what were the objectives that were identified, and how they were transformed into system requirements. Finally, we describe the first prototype of the learning space management system, which was developed using these requirements.

Academic advising is a process between the advisee, adviser and the academic institution which provides the degree requirements and courses contained in it. Content-wise planning and management of the student’ study path, guidance on studies and academic career support is the main joint activity of advising. The purpose of this article is to propose the use of learning analytics methods, more precisely robust clustering, for creation of groups of actual study profiles of students. This allows academic advisers to provide evidence-based information on the study paths that have actually happened similarly to individual students. Moreover, academic institutions can focus on management and updates of course schedule having an effect of clearly characterized and recognized group of students. Using this approach a model of automated academic advising process, which can determine the study profiles, is presented. The presented model shows the whole automated process, where the learners will be profiled regularly, and where the proper study path will be suggested.

Computing is the latest add-on to enhance the K-12 curricula of many countries, with the purpose of closing the digital skills gap. The revised Finnish Curriculum 2014 integrates computing mainly into math. Consequently, Finland needs to train math teachers to teach computing at elementary level. This study describes the Python and Racket tracks of the Code ABC MOOC that introduce programming basics for math teachers. Their suitability for math is compared based on the course content and feedback. The results show that conceptually the functional paradigm of Racket approaches math more closely, in particular algebra. In addition, Racket is generally regarded as more challenging in terms of syntax and e.g. for utilizing recursion as an iteration mechanism. Math teachers also rank its suitability higher because the content and exercises of the track are specifically tailored for their subject.

This paper examines ways to enrich the feedback information students receive in closed-type quiz activities that include a revision phase (i.e., students are allowed to change their initial answers after they receive information from their peers, teacher, or system). Typically, in such activities, the information students receive is based on the percentage of students under each possible question choice. The conducted study analyzes the potential of two additional variables, namely the students’ level of preparation and confidence. Both variables are self-reported and, therefore, subjective. During the Fall semester 2016, 91 sophomore students enrolled in an Information Systems course participated in the study for five weeks. The activity was taking place during the first 20 min of each class. Students had to go through three phases and (a) answer a multiple-choice quiz with 8 questions and 4 options for each question, (b) receive feedback based on the whole classroom population, and (c) see the correct answer and discuss them with the teacher in the lecture that follows. The students were randomly grouped into four conditions, based on the feedback they received. The control group only received information on the percentage of students that selected each choice, the Confidence group received feedback on the percentage and the average level of confidence of students that selected each choice, the Preparation group received feedback on the percentage and the average level of preparation of students that selected each choice, and finally the Both group received feedback on the percentage and both the average level of confidence and preparation of students that selected each choice. Result analysis showed that in the most challenging questions (i.e., the ones where students’ answers were diverging) the students in the Confidence, Preparation, and Both groups significantly outperformed the students in the Control group. In addition, both confidence and preparation variables were significantly correlated to students’ performance during the initial phase, suggesting that students were accurate and sincere in describing their preparation and confidence levels. This paper is an extended version of [1], presented at the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education.

This paper describes the design and preliminary evaluations of AMBRE-KB. The goal of this authoring tool is to assist authors to elicit knowledge needed to design AMBRE ITSs without any programming. Such ITS enable learners to acquire a specific method in problem-solving. AMBRE-KB is based on meta-models of knowledge to be acquired. It supports the acquisition of knowledge to be taught, and the description of problems to be solved. At the end of the knowledge elicitation process, it enables the author to have a feedback about the process by testing the resolution of problems described. We present the authoring process and the evaluations made in four domains: resolution of equations (1^st and 2^nd degree), the calculation of areas of geometric shapes, the plural of French nouns and the formation of French adverbs ending with ‘ment’.

Pursuing online degrees and taking online courses, especially in complex subjects, can be challenging to many adult learners who have to juggle work, family responsibilities, and financial commitments. To better address the needs of these students, a series of online interactive learning modules informed by multimedia theory for teaching declarative and procedural knowledge were created and integrated in an online statistics course. Design and development was followed by evaluative efforts, which were conducted over a period of nine months with a total of 167 undergraduate students and six instructors. Students’ perceptions on the modules’ usability features (e.g., pace of audio presentations, ease of navigation, and layout) as well as on cognitive support and effectiveness of the modules to teach statistics were analyzed. Students and instructors’ reflections on their experiences with the modules were also gathered and analyzed. Both set of participants were overwhelmingly positive about their online learning and teaching experiences of statistics. Online courses and interactive multimedia firmly grounded in learning theories provide effective learning experiences and rich interaction with the course content. This is particularly important when teaching complex content as mathematics and statistics.

Due to the increasing importance of IT technologies in the organizations’ operation, IT related jobs have become highly demanded. That is the case of IT architects, who are responsible for aligning the business needs and motivations with the technology solutions that support company functions. However, the offer of qualified IT architects is not enough to cover the demand. This happens mainly because the training needed to acquire the technology, business, communications, and management skills required for the role is long and difficult to get. This paper describes the creation of virtual enterprises as a tool for facilitating the training of IT architects. These virtual enterprises imitate the real challenges that an IT architect may confront in real life projects, thus helping the trainees acquire the desired experience and expertise.

Information and communication technologies are reshaping the way we live and work. The expectation is that computational thinking will be a pervasive skill in (near-) future professions of ours’ increasingly digitized and responsive economies. Although this idea is spread and well accepted, acquiring such skills often implies attending specialized courses. However, the basic concepts of computational thinking do not need to be a specialized skill learned disassociated from other school curricula. As it is more related with mental tools used in the process of reflecting and solving problems it can be learned by being applied to a large variety of topics.

This paper presents piBook, a tool designed to allow the acquisition of key computational thinking skills while working on topics such as history, biology, and mathematics, among other. By reaching diversified audiences piBook fosters the acquisition of those skills by future workers at large. It does so via the production of programmable interactive books, hence piBook, that make possible interactive storytelling using nonlinear narratives, by allowing the creation of textual games, interactive activities, tutorials and alike, therefore offering opportunities for new and engaging pedagogical methods.

The traditional instructor-led classroom training has been a dominant training method for millennia. During the past few decades, the information and communications technology have evolved in giant leaps. This has brought new options for providing of and participating in training. Online participation has been found to be a cost-effective way to attend training using standard consumer technology. It allows people to attend to training regardless their physical location, allowing them to deal with the time and cost pressures typically faced in workplaces. But is online participation as effective as classroom training? Previous studies in the higher education sector have demonstrated that the student satisfaction and learning outcomes do not differ between online and classroom participants. However, little is known how does the learning channel affect commercial ICT-training, where typical courses are full-day instructor lead courses lasting one to four days. We studied student satisfaction of a commercial ICT-training provider, which provides hybrid courses having both online and classroom participants. As anticipated, the results show that online participants are not as satisfied with course arrangements as the classroom participants. The most surprising finding is that there is a small, but statistically significant, difference how participants perceive teacher’s substance skills. This suggests that teachers might not be able to share their knowledge online as effectively as in the classroom. The results also provide some techniques and tools which could improve online participants’ satisfaction.

In this paper, we present how the design of mobile learning applications has undergone three different phases since the beginning of this millennium. Users’ expectations and requirements on m-learning applications have continuously evolved and affected the applications through the different phases. Initially (era 1), the evolvement was a result of the advancement of mobile technologies, devices, and network services. However, technology is not the sole source of evolvement: users’ changing expectations and cultural surroundings have an increasing impact on the utilisation of m-learning applications. During the second era focus shifted toward usability (efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction). The emerging third era has focus on experiential factors which impact the sustainable use of a mobile learning application. The case examples in the paper demonstrate the transitions from technological era to usability era - and even further to user experience era with analyses on emotional, experiential, and engaging factors. The resulting three eras outlined in this paper help developers anticipating future demands with development activities focusing on emotions and engagement.

In this paper we describe work to investigate the creation of engaging programming learning experiences. Background research informed the design of four fieldwork studies to explore how programming tasks could be framed to motivate learners. Our empirical findings from these four field studies are summarized here, with a particular focus upon one – Whack a Mole – which compared the use of a physical interface with the use of a screen-based equivalent interface to obtain insights into what made for an engaging learning experience. Emotions reported by two sets of participant undergraduate students were analyzed, identifying the links between the emotions experienced during programming and their origin. Evidence was collected of the very positive emotions experienced by learners programming with a physical interface (Arduino) in comparison with a similar program developed using a screen-based equivalent interface. A follow-up study provided further evidence of the motivation of personalized design of programming tangible physical artefacts. Collating all the evidence led to the design of a set of ‘Learning Dimensions’ which may provide educators with insights to support key design decisions for the creation of engaging programming learning experiences.

In this paper, I present a flipped classroom approach for teaching a master’s course on artificial intelligence. Traditional lectures from the classroom are outsourced to an open online course that contains high quality video lectures, step-by-step tutorials and demonstrations of intelligent algorithms, and self-tests, quizzes, and multiple-choice questions. Moreover, selected problems, or coding challenges, are cherry-picked from a suitable game-like coding development platform that rids both students and the teacher of having to implement much of the fundamental boilerplate code required to generate a suitable simulation environment in which students can implement and test their algorithms. Using the resources of the online course and the coding platform thus free up much valuable time for active learning in the classroom. These learning activities are carefully chosen to align with the intended learning outcomes, curriculum, and assessment to allow for learning to be constructed by the students themselves under guidance by the teacher. Thus, I perceive the teacher’s role as a facilitator for learning, much similar to that of a personal trainer or a coach. Emphasising problem-solving as key to achieving intended learning outcomes, the aim is to select problems that strike a balance between detailed step-by-step tutorials and highly open-ended problems. This paper consists of an overview of relevant literature, the course content and teaching methods, recent evaluation reports and a student evaluation survey, results from the final oral exams, and a discussion regarding some limiting frame factors, challenges with my approach, and future directions.

The culture of playing video games has evolved rapidly in the past decade. Presently, there are many different types of online communities that have games or a particular game as their focus. Some games, in particular, can be used as a platform for introducing and discussing computer science concepts. We wanted to investigate how these online gaming communities and computer science are intertwined. We approached this by gathering user interaction data in two previous studies from which this article presents a more comprehensive synthesis. We found that the online gaming communities have rich interactions that relate to programming and computer science. Based on the qualitative analysis, we categorized these interactions in three themes: learning, programming experience, and community. In addition to the interaction analysis, we present four perspectives that we found particularly useful in analyzing these online communities: engagement, interactivity, exposure, and technical detail. We conclude that these communities and interactions within them can act as a form of outreach. Furthermore, they act as places where newcomers meet with more experienced programmers.

More than 800 users from a cross-section of ages and gender were asked about the games they play and what motivates them to play these. The answers were cross-matched with game features. Based on this match and subjective answers of those surveyed, a pattern emerges for the essential ingredients of addictive games across these demographics, as well as an anti-pattern. With the derived pattern and anti-pattern several games and real-world scenarios can be designed and existing ones analyzed. Examples show how the pattern or anti-pattern can be applied and elucidate which key ingredients tend to be missing.

Following the increased interest in students becoming partners in teaching and learning in higher education settings, this study explores students’ perceptions on a collaborative content generation activity, in which students assume also the role of peer-tutors. Students in an Information Systems course collaborated on domain topics, assigned to them by the teacher, and created learning material for their fellow students. In the peer-tutoring session following the creation of the learning material, students presented the topic in class and discussed it with their peers. Each peer tutoring session was assessed by the students as audience (students attending the student-tutoring sessions). The aim of the study is to explore students’ perspectives on the collaborative content generation assignment. Our focus primarily is to examine how students’ experiences regarding the collaboration were affected by learning strategies in self-regulation, peer learning, and help seeking. Results showed that students were more engaged in the course after participating in the co-creating learning material activity and also, four distinct patterns of collaboration were revealed by analyzing student activity. Even though students were in general satisfied with their collaboration, as they could suit the activity to their needs, those students who relied more on their group for help proved to be less satisfied by the communication among group members. In addition, the teacher and the audience evaluated positively the students’ performance as peer-tutors. This paper is an extended version of [1], presented at the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education.

In this article, we make a number of observations and reflections based on our experience from many years of teaching courses in electrical and computer engineering bachelor programmes. We present important aspects of attendance, lectures, group work, and compulsory coursework, and how these can be addressed to improve student learning. Moreover, we discuss how to facilitate active learning activities, focussing on simple in-classroom activities and larger problem-based activities such as assignments, projects, and laboratory work, and highlight solving real-world problems by means of practical application of relevant theory as key to achieving intended learning outcomes. Our observations and reflections are then put into a theoretical context, including students’ approaches of learning, constructive alignment, active learning, and problem-based versus problem-solving learning. Next, we present and discuss the results from two recent student evaluation surveys, one for senior (final-year) students and one for junior (first- and second-year) students, and draw some conclusions. Finally, we add some remarks regarding our findings and point to future work.

This paper presents a computer-assisted method specifically designed to incorporate formative assessment into classroom practice. It is based on the following five key strategies. First, different written materials are provided to students to help clarify goals and success criteria. Second, students are involved in real-world engineering projects that are oriented to learning about project management. Thus, they adopt an active role during the learning process. Third, different types of feedback are implemented and provided several times during the project development in order to allow students to use the feedback to close their performance gap. Fourth, each student is assessed by all the other students of the project interacting with the student in question, i.e., peer-assessment is activated. Fifth, self-assessment is also considered. Data analysis from a specific academic course suggest that the proposed method has a positive impact on the academic achievements of engineering students.

The widespread use of computing and communications technologies has also arrived at the education field, an area where general and custom-designed online social networking software platforms are being increasingly employed in formal course offerings at all education levels. Despite the widespread use of open online social networks (OSN), the relationship between the social ties among students and their academic performance is not yet well understood. In this chapter, we report on a longitudinal experiment with a purpose-specific OSN run at the graduate level and apply a structural analysis of the students’ network. We show that some of the basic structural properties in these networks (e.g., centrality, community structure, reciprocity, egonetworks) are correlated with the final outcome and grades of the students. Thus, social network analysis during the instruction period can be effectively used to classify, rank and identify types of students according to the intensity, quality and engagement into the OSN. These features and the network structure are plausible variables to predict their ultimate academic achievements, too. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of the role of social learning among highly educated students.

Parental involvement in kindergarten has been pointed out as an important factor in cognitive development, child behavior and school adaptation. In kindergarten, parents can get involved in various ways. Web technologies can facilitate two types of parental involvement: communication with the early childhood educator, to learn more about child’s learning process in kindergarten, and home-based educational activities, using digital educational content. In this sense, the research team set up a design research, aimed to develop a multimedia platform that promotes communication and resource sharing among educators, parents and children, to facilitate parental involvement in learning. This article presents the development of the platform, from the preliminary studies to the evaluation of the functional prototype, with the participation of parents and educators in all phases of the development process.

Informal Learning in the Workplace (ILW) is ensured by the everyday work activities in which workers are engaged. It accounts for over 75% of learning in the workplace. Enterprise Social Media (ESM) are increasingly used to promote informal learning environments. In this paper, we discuss the principles and features of social media, and present to what extent they promote informal learning in the workplace. We propose also a user-centred design methodology to redesign a traditional knowledge-sharing tool with social features. We then present an implementation, in a real context, of the methodology. It shows that ESM are appropriate to promote ILW. Three adaptations must nevertheless be carried out: (1) Base the design on a precise and relatively exhaustive informational corpus and contextualize the access in the form of community of practice structured according to collaborative spaces; (2) Add indicators of judgment on the operational quality of information and the informational capital built, and (3) Define forms of moderation and control consistent with the hierarchical structures of the company. Our analysis also shows that an incremental and iterative approach of user-centered design had to be implemented to define how to adapt the design and to accompany change.