This study investigated the computational thinking (CT) practices of eight pre-service teachers through their Scratch and Python programs. Conducted within an undergraduate-level computer science education course, students learned CT concepts via parallel instruction in block-based programming (Scratch) and text-based programming (Python). The…

Designing programmed technological solutions (PTS) with programming materials has become a way to contextualise educational content related to PTS and programming. However, studies show that pupils have difficulties conceptualising central phenomena involved in the process, which affects their ability to design PTS. In order to understand these…

During the last decade, global optimization has attracted a lot of attention due to the increased practical need for obtaining global solutions and the success in solving many global optimization problems that were previously considered intractable. In general, the central question of global optimization is to find an optimal solution to a given…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy in which students solve problems and reflect on their experiences. Different domains need different approaches in the design of PBL systems. Therefore, we present one case study in this article: A Java Programming PBL. The application is developed as an additional module for…

One of the subjects that undergraduate students learning Object Oriented (OO) design find hard to apply is the construction of class hierarchies in general, and the use of interface classes in particular. The design process requires decomposition and reconstruction of problems in order to model software classes. The common attributes and behaviors…

Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is not an easy subject to learn. There are many challenges confronting students when studying OOAD. Students have particular difficulty abstracting real-world problems within the context of OOAD. They are unable to effectively build object-oriented (OO) models from the problem domain because they…

How do you dynamically customize the programming language available in a context within an existing system, without changing the underlying system? This dissertation introduces a language design approach that addresses this problem. The basic idea is to structure programs as systems of multiple interacting levels of abstraction, where all of the…

Nowadays we need to teach students how to become flexible problem solvers in a dynamic world. The pace in which technology changes and complexity increases requires increased efficiency in learning and understanding. This requires the engineers of tomorrow to quickly gain knowledge and insight outside their prime area of expertise. To transfer…

In this paper we consider prior definitions of the terms "ill-defined domain" and "ill-defined problem". We then present alternate definitions that better support research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Education. In our view both problems and domains are ill-defined when essential concepts, relations, or criteria are un- or…

The Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) support creation of a novel type of tutors called example-tracing tutors. Unlike other types of ITSs (e.g., model-tracing tutors, constraint-based tutors), example-tracing tutors evaluate student behavior by flexibly comparing it against generalized examples of problem-solving behavior. Example-tracing…

In well-defined domains such as Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry, solutions to a posed problem can objectively be classified as correct or incorrect. In ill-defined domains such as medicine, the classification of solutions to a patient problem as correct or incorrect is much more complex. Typical tutoring systems accept only a small set of…

This paper proposes a learning based method that can automatically determine how likely a student is to give a correct answer to a problem in an intelligent tutoring system. Only log files that record students' actions with the system are used to train the model, therefore the modeling process doesn't require expert knowledge for identifying…

Educators recognize that group work and physical involvement with learning materials can greatly enhance the understanding and retention of difficult concepts. As a result, math manipulatives--such as pattern blocks and number lines--have increasingly been making their way into classrooms and children's museums. Yet without the constant guidance…

New WWW technologies allow for integrating distance education power of WWW with interactivity and intelligence. Integrating on-line presentation of learning materials with the interactivity of problem solving environments and the intelligence of intelligent tutoring systems results in a new quality of learning materials that we call I3-textbooks.…