Informatics in Education

This study addresses an implementation problem for informatics education: whether teachers’ reported participation in AI-related professional learning, interpreted as realised access to one professional learning condition for teacher AI literacy, is associated with declared need or instead follows existing patterns of digital, professional and organisational advantage. The study does not measure teacher AI literacy, AI competence, computing teaching practice, computational-thinking instruction or classroom implementation directly. Rather, it analyses reported participation in AI-related professional learning as a realised opportunity condition for developing teacher AI literacy at scale. Using TALIS 2024 data from 108,136 lower-secondary teachers nested within 10,840 schools across 55 education systems, three-level multilevel linear probability models and random slopes at the education-system level were estimated. Results showed substantial cross-system inequality in reported participation. Variance decomposition located 8.5% of total variation at the education-system level and 9.7% at the school level. Declared need was only partially associated with reported participation: teachers reporting low or moderate need were more likely to have participated in AI-related professional learning than those reporting no need, whereas teachers with the highest need showed no significant advantage. Digital self-efficacy and professional collaboration were consistently associated with higher participation. At the school level, digital resource shortages and school digital leadership support were significant predictors. Random-slope estimates showed that the association between high declared need and participation varied significantly across education systems. The findings suggest that equitable teacher AI literacy requires deliberate opportunity structures, not only competence frameworks or voluntary participation in professional learning.

In Poland, talent development is organized mainly outside or alongside the educational system. A large number of privately funded informatics contests and extra-curricular talent development programs for highly motivated students are available. However, traditional competitions also exist including national informatics Olympiads and competitions mainly supported by the Ministry of Education. In particular, we stimulate interest in informatics by organizing the annual nationwide InfoSukces contest. This contest was organized for the first time in 2015 when informatics education in Poland was experiencing difficulties recruiting new students, who were in growing demand on the labor market. The aim of the contest is now to make students aware that the jobs of the future require problem-solving, digital skills, and creative thinking, all of which can be taught through informatics. The contest also provides a platform for a unique series of activities, the goal of which is to support partnerships and knowledge flow between schools and universities. This article provides a case study of the final stage of the InfoSukces contest, which involves the participants developing a “work of art” in the Scratch programming environment. It also presents the holistic method for quantitative evaluation of the students’ creative visual-based programming projects.

There are many important issues in informatics and many agree that algorithms and programming are most important issues that need to be included in informatics education (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012). In this paper, we propose how some of these issues can be easily taught using the notion of a formal system which consists of axioms and inference rules by which theorems can be proved. As is argued in (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012), we can introduce important topics in informatics using puzzle-like examples and students do not need to have prerequisites for learning. The materials presented in this paper have been used in a college-level elective class titled Hypertext and Computability in our university since the fall semester of 2008 and we believe that the contents proposed in this paper can be easily used to teach beginner students without technical backgrounds.

A recent report by the joint Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education emphasizes that: (1) computational thinking is an important ability that all people should possess; (2) informatics-based concepts, abilities and skills are teachable, and must be included in the primary and particularly in the secondary school curriculum. Accordingly, the "2013 Best Practices in Education Award" (organized by Informatics Europe) was devoted to initiatives promoting Informatics Education in Primary and Secondary Schools. In this paper we present one of the winning projects: "Multi-Sensory Informatics Education". We have developed effective multi-sensory methods and software-tools to improve the teaching-learning process of elementary, sorting and recursive algorithms. The technologically and artistically enhanced learning environment we present has also the potential to promote intercultural computer science education and the algorithmic thinking of both science- and humanities-oriented learners.

It is easy to underestimate the difficulties of using floating-point numbers in programming. This is especially the case in pre-university informatics education and competitions, where one is often led to believe that floating-point arithmetic is a good approximation of the real number system. However, most of the mathematical laws valid for real numbers break down when applied to floating-point numbers. We explain this break-down and illustrate it with four simple examples.