ISSEP 2015
September 28 – October 1
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Part of Information Society 2015

Accepted workshops

The following workshop proposals have been accepted to ISSEP 2015, listed in no particular order:

 

Workshop summaries 

Teaching Software Engineering in Primary and Secondary Schools

Peter Antonitsch, Andreas Bollin, Stefan Pasterk, Barbara Sabitzer
Institute for Informatics and Informatics Didactics, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Software Engineering Research Group, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Software is everywhere – be it in mobile phones, in washing machines, or in cars. With it, the importance of software Engineering (SE) is uncontested, and it is taught all over the world: at Universities, at Colleges, and recently also at High Schools. There are international Software Engineering curricula, standards, and certificates, but there is no manifestation of SE (and related practices) in the course syllabi at primary and secondary schools. Most important, SE is not just programming.
Taking a closer look at SE, its main goal is to develop programs that are affordable and dependable for consumers without bugs or glitches. In order to do so, SE education must account for a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills that software engineers will be required to apply throughout their professional life. Covering all the topics in depth within a school setting (from primary to secondary schools) seems to be infeasible due to the previous knowledge of the pupils, the curricular constraints as well as due to the inherent differences between the school types. Similar arguments hold for the teachers, as most of them are not really trained in SE. Now, based on the authors’ experiences gained in combining SE topics with school projects in a vocational high school for commerce and tourism (11th grade) in cooperation with a lower secondary school (6th grade) it turned out that, by customization of the approach, one is able to address pupils with different maturity levels, educational aims, and backgrounds.
The objective of this 90-minutes workshop is to show that it is possible to interweave SE topics with school projects and to motivate for the most important practices related to that field. Key skills and challenges are identified, mapped to the situation at hand, and, by following a stepwise approach, example settings are discussed.

 

A web service for teaching programming

Gregor Jerše, Sonja Jerše, Matija Lokar, Matija Pretnar
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Programming is a skill that can be best learned by writing as many programs as one can. So teachers are required to expose the students to numerous problems and of course supervise their attempts to solve them. To support this teaching approach, the authors developed a web service Projekt Tomo, which we aim to present at the workshop. This service has already been successfully used in various courses ranging from secondary schools to introductory courses in higher education.
The service works as follows: the student first downloads the files containing problems to his computer and starts filling in the solutions, checking them locally in his favourite coding environment, while the server automatically stores and verifies the solutions. In this way, there is no need for powerful servers and the service provides instantaneous feedback to the student and an overall insight into the obtained knowledge to both the student and the teacher, all without disturbing the teaching process. This helps teacher save time which he can spend for in-depth discussion about programming and giving additional help to those who need it.
An important aspect is also the fact that existing programming environment can be used by the student.
The teachers can also view a student’s history of attempts and download the files with the attempted solutions if they want to analyse the student’s progress and provide appropriate advice. These submissions can serve as a valuable insight into efforts made by the students towards the solutions. The service can be adapted to almost all teaching environments, as it can be used with all programming languages and has low technical requirements.

Agenda:

  • Introduction to the web service - understanding the motivation behind the web service, logging into the service.
  • Solving problems (as a student) - downloading a problem file, submitting a correct and an incorrect solution, understanding feedback.
  • Analyzing submitted solutions (as a teacher) - getting an overview of correctness of submitted solutions, looking at individual feedbacks, exploring the history of student submissions.
  • Creating and editing problems (as a teacher) - modifying an existing problem, adding automated tests, creating a new problem.
  • Discussion - getting feedback to steer future development.

 

Learning Computational Thinking through Bebras Tasks

Valentina Dagiene, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Gerald Futschek, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

This workshop addresses all educationists and education scientists who are interested how school students can learn informatics (computer science) concepts and Computational Thinking through a contest.
The International Bebras Contest on Informatics is the world’s largest contest on Computational Thinking. In the 2014 contest more than 900,000 students participated in 36 countries of all continents. The students have to solve 15 to 21 tasks within 40 to 60 minutes. To solve these tasks, students do not need specific pre-knowledge.
Tasks are developed for different age groups, from primary school to upper secondary school students.
The tasks contain concepts of about nearly all areas of informatics. Usually a short story introduces a task and states a problem, termini technici are not used, but to solve the task some kind of computational thinking must be applied. There are tasks about concept categories of information representation, algorithms, programming, logic, encryption and many other.

Items discussed in the workshop:

  • Operational definition of computational thinking
  • Why Bebras tasks can convey computational thinking?
  • Which concepts of informatics can be introduced through Bebras tasks?
  • How to teach computational thinking using Bebras tasks?
  • Relations of Bebras contests to informatics curricula in various countries
  • Formal and informal introducing informatics concepts

In the workshop the participants will learn more about the Bebras contest, how the tasks are created,
which kind of tasks were produced, what are the effects on learning and teaching. We will discuss how the Bebras contest should be performed in a school context and how the teachers may use the Bebras tasks in their teaching activities. The participants will experience wow-effects while solving Bebras tasks and how thinking is directed to solving strategies that are typical for informatics and computational thinking.

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