This paper presents the first experiences of the use of an online open-source repository with programming exercises. The repository is independent of any specific teaching approach. Students can search for and select an exercise that trains the programming concepts that they want to train and that only uses the programming concepts they already know. Then, they can submit their solutions and get automatic feedback from the system. We analyzed quantitatively how students used the system by inspecting the logged actions of the students using the system. We also did a qualitative analysis by interviews, to find out how the students appreciated the use of the repository and to get feedback for improvements. We focused on how students select exercises as finding the exercise that fulfills the training needs of a student is the innovative part of our repository.
Source code plagiarism is an emerging issue in computer science education. As a result, a number of techniques have been proposed to handle this issue. However, comparing these techniques may be challenging, since they are evaluated with their own private dataset(s). This paper contributes in providing a public dataset for comparing these techniques. Specifically, the dataset is designed for evaluation with an Information Retrieval (IR) perspective. The dataset consists of 467 source code files, covering seven introductory programming assessment tasks. Unique to this dataset, both intention to plagiarise and advanced plagiarism attacks are considered in its construction. The dataset's characteristics were observed by comparing three IR-based detection techniques, and it is clear that most IR-based techniques are less effective than a baseline technique which relies on Running-Karp-Rabin Greedy-String-Tiling, even though some of them are far more time-efficient.
Programming is one of the basic subjects in most informatics, computer science mathematics and technical faculties' curricula. Integrated overview of the models for teaching programming, problems in teaching and suggested solutions were presented in this paper. Research covered current state of 1019 programming subjects in 715 study programmes at total of 218 faculties and 143 universities in 35 European countries that were analyzed. It was concluded that while most of the programmes highly support object-oriented paradigm of programming, introductory programming subjects are mainly based on imperative paradigm.
The goal of this literature study is to give some preliminary answers to the questions that aim to uncover the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of Informatics Education, with focus on Programming. PCK has been defined as the knowledge that allows teachers to transform their knowledge of the subject into something accessible for their students. The core questions to uncover this knowledge are: what are the reasons to teach programming; what are the concepts we need to teach programming; what are the most common difficulties/misconceptions students encounter while learning to program; and how to teach this topic. Some of the answers found are, respectively: enhancing students' problem solving skills; programming knowledge and programming strategies; general problems of orientation; and possible ideal chains for learning computer programming. Because answers to the four questions are in a way not connected with each other, PCK being an unexplored field in Informatics Education, we need research based efforts to study this field.
Mathematical logic is a discipline used in sciences and humanities with different point of view. Although in tertiary level computer science education it has a solid place, it does not hold also for secondary level education. We present a heterogeneous study both theoretical based and empirically based which points out the key role of logic in computer science, computer science education and knowledge representation. We focus on the key contrast of semantics and syntax, the resolution principle as a leading inference technique (giving also interesting non-clausal generalization of the rule). Further we discuss the possibilities of inclusion the non-classical (many-valued) logics in education together with the original generalization of the non-clausal resolution rule into fuzzy logic. The last part describes partial results of the research concerning the secondary education in the Czech Republic especially in the mathematical logic field. The generalization of the presented ideas entails the article.