Developing abilities to master modern technologies and skills for problem solving are among the most important capabilities of an educated future citizen in a knowledge society. Problem solving by means of programming...
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(纸本)9781906638221
Developing abilities to master modern technologies and skills for problem solving are among the most important capabilities of an educated future citizen in a knowledge society. Problem solving by means of programming does not lose its importance in a contemporary school equipped with modern information technologies and remains a highly important part in the understanding of information processing. Programming with emphasis on algorithms remains core to the International Olympiads in Informatics and other competitions in Computer Science. Consequently, the introduction of algorithms and programming as an abstract and powerful tool for understanding the algorithmic world and information technologies is advocated and supported by expert recommendations, e.g. as given by UNESCO and IFIP. In Lithuania, the idea of teachingalgorithms and programming by distance (originally by correspondence using the ordinary post service, later applying internet-based means such as electronic mail and virtual learning environments) was started in the early 1980s. The Young Programmers School was set up at the research Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in 1981 and it has continued until now. It might be one of the oldest continually running distance learning schools for programming anywhere in the world. Various teaching methods have been used to attract students and to help them to learn deeper programming e.g. an overview for each submitted work, detailed teacher comments, questions and exercises depending on the student level, additional exercises and tasks. There is no doubt that learning algorithms and programming is effective only when students are actively involved - that is why solving tasks is the highest priority in the school. Tasks have to be selected to match student ability, they must cover as many theoretical problems as possible, and teach students algorithms and programming methods. Evaluation of developed algorithms is mainly a combination of two methods: it is
Learning analytics has emerged as a promising tool for optimizing the learning experience and results, especially in online educational environments. An important challenge in this area is identifying the most difficu...
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Learning analytics has emerged as a promising tool for optimizing the learning experience and results, especially in online educational environments. An important challenge in this area is identifying the most difficult topics for students in a subject, which is of great use to improve the quality of teaching by devoting more effort to those topics of greater difficulty, assigning them more time, resources and materials. We have approached the problem by means of natural language processing techniques. In particular, we propose a solution based on a deep learning model that automatically extracts the main topics that are covered in educational documents. This model is next applied to the problem of identifying the most difficult topics for students in a subject related to the study of algorithms and data structures in a Computer Science degree. Our results show that our topic identification model presents very high accuracy (around 90 percent) and may be efficiently used in learning analytics applications, such as the identification and understanding of what makes the learning of a subject difficult. An exhaustive analysis of the case study has also revealed that there are indeed topics that are consistently more difficult for most students, and also that the perception of difficulty in students and teachers does not always coincide with the actual difficulty indicated by the data, preventing to pay adequate attention to the most challenging topics.
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