Juan Manuel Dodero

Universidad de Cádiz | UCA · Department of Informatics Engineering

La comprensión de las bases de datos no solo requiere conocimientos técnicos, sino también una capacidad para conceptualizar y organizar información de manera lógica y sistemática, lo cual puede resultar desafiante para muchos estudiantes de informática. Para ayudar al estudiante en el aprendizaje y entrenamiento de SQL, este trabajo presenta la he...

Chatbots have arrived in higher education, and professors are trying to make the most of them. Typically, chatbots are used to help students learn academic subjects. In times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, students who were not living with their families during the course, especially international students, were isolated and in critical...

Erasmus students spend part of their academic stage in a foreign country, which enriches their experience significantly. During the second semester of the 2019–20 academic year and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students found themselves isolated and confined in a country that was not their own. Students lived with uncertainty and many doubts a...

SQL is a key programming language for data scientists, but its learning is sometimes challenging, especially if the learner does not have a proper computer science background. This article introduces ChatbotSQL, a conversational agent that aims to support the autonomous learning of the SQL language for database querying. ChatbotSQL proposes exercis...

Machine-learning classifiers can be leveraged as a two-sample statistical test. Suppose each sample is assigned a different label and that a classifier can obtain a better-than-chance result discriminating them. In this case, we can infer that both samples originate from different populations. However, many types of models, such as neural networks,...

Aunque el uso de herramientas de evaluación automáticas ha ido en crecimiento en las últimas décadas, con la llegada de la pandemia del COVID-19 su uso se hizo aun mayor. Entre las herramientas de evaluación automática destacan los cuestionarios, que suelen venir integrados en los principales LMS con una gran variedad de opciones para personalizarl...

The diversity of information sources available to educational institutions makes it necessary to mash up information in order to get the highest performance through learning analytics. Data mashup requires the implementation of data anonymisation methods in order to protect the privacy of the learners who appear in the data partitions. However, the...

Flip-GET has been developed with the objective of optimizing engineering practicals. The innovative element of this methodology is the use of serious games, as a complement to the flipped classroom method, in the teaching-learning process of engineering studies. This methodology uses serious games to take advantage of the capacity of motivation tha...

This paper describes the types of MOOC considered by researchers, and highlights the latter’s focus on Connectivist MOOC. In addition, it analyses MOOC methodologies, and learners’ interest in MOOC based on the concepts of adaptability, connectivism, and socio-constructivism. This is to address the high dropout rate issue on MOOC platforms. The mai...

Cross-matching data stored on separate files is an everyday activity in the scientific domain. However, sometimes the relation between attributes may not be obvious. The discovery of foreign keys on relational databases is a similar problem. Thus techniques devised for this problem can be adapted. Nonetheless, when the data is numeric and subject t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an imposed acquisition of digital skills. End-user development tools have demonstrated their potential, enabling non-expert users without an advanced knowledge of programming languages to create their own software artifacts. Moreover, advances in natural language processing and understanding have enabled the emergen...

The introduction of mobile devices such as smartphones provides new opportunities to enhance the teaching–learning process of a foreign language. However, its use can affect not only the students’ type and form of writing but also their ability to achieve the academic competencies targeted. Thus, aspects such as the development of linguistic and co...

Virtual Worlds (VWs) are popular tools for teaching/learning in the twenty-first century classroom. The challenge remains however, to provide the means by which teachers could sustainably analyse and assess the performance of large groups of students in such environments. Unfortunately, external game features such as game scores and play duration h...

Lecturers are often reluctant to set examinations online because of the potential problems of fraudulent behaviour from their students. This concern has increased during the coronavirus pandemic because courses that were previously designed to be taken face-to-face have to be conducted online. The courses have had to be redesigned, including semina...

SQL es un lenguaje ampliamente usado en ingeniería informática, siendo uno de los pilares fundamentales en la explotación de bases de datos relacionales desde hace décadas. Sin embargo, a pesar de ser un lenguaje aparentemente sencillo, su aprendizaje a fondo suele presentar dificultades para los estudiantes, sobre todo cuando se realiza de manera...

Systematic reviews are powerful methods used to determine the state-of-the-art in a given field from existing studies and literature. They are critical but time-consuming in research and decision making for various disciplines. When conducting a review, a large volume of data is usually generated from relevant studies. Computer-based tools are ofte...

Sharing patient datasets curated by health institutions is critical for the advance of monitoring, surveillance and research. However, patient data is sensitive data and it can only be released under certain conditions and with previous explicit consent. Privacy preserving data sharing provides techniques to distribute datasets minimizing the risk...

Given two relations containing multiple measurements - possibly with uncertainties - our objective is to find which sets of attributes from the first have a corresponding set on the second, using exclusively a sample of the data. This approach could be used even when the associated metadata is damaged, missing or incomplete, or when the volume is t...

Video game development is still a difficult task today, requiring strong programming skills and knowledge of multiple technologies. To tackle this problem, some visual tools such as Unity or Unreal have appeared. These tools are effective and easy to use, but they are not entirely aimed at end-users with little knowledge of software engineering. Cu...

The use of code quality control platforms for analysing source code is increasingly gaining attention in the developer community. These platforms are prepared to parse and check source code written in a variety of general-purpose programming languages. The emergence of domain-specific languages enables professionals from different areas to develop...

Teamwork is one of the key issues in engineering projects success. Unfortunately, due to the high number of interactions, the assessment of collaborative tasks remains a challenge. Wikis are web-based systems that support collaborative work in enterprise engineering project documentation providing quantitative data from the members' contributions a...

Se describen las líneas de investigación del grupo Mejora del Proceso Software y Métodos Formales de la Universidad de Cádiz, en relación a las tecnologías del aprendizaje e informática educativa. Palabras clave: Computación creativa, desarrollo centrado en el usuario, wikis, analítica del aprendizaje, juegos aplicados, aprendizaje móvil de idiomas...

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in A...

The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was ‘CALL and complexity’. As languages are known to be intrinsically and linguistically complex, as are the many determinants of learning (additional) languages, complexity is viewed as a challenge to be embraced collectively. The 2019 conference allowed us to pay tribute...

The aim of this paper is to broaden our view on the relationship between Computational Thinking and the development of the abstraction skill applied to mathematics. It was aimed to reveal trends and new potential solutions to be explored in the teaching of mathematics. We carefully selected sixty-four papers related with the objective above cited....

Students in higher education are traditionally requested to produce various pieces of written work during the courses they undertake. When students' work is submitted online as a whole, both the ethically questionable act of procrastinating and late submissions afect performance. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of students...

Organizations need employees who perform satisfactorily in generic skills, such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving or interpersonal abilities, among others. In organizational environments, employees perform work that is not always visible for supervisors and, thus, they can hardly assess their performance in generic skills. By using a knowled...

Game-based learning has proven to be effective for enhancing student motivation and learning outcomes. In this study, the authors first designed and then tested a 3D virtual world-based video game to support students in learning a foreign language. Two data mining clustering techniques are used to analyse the impact of the game on learning processe...

A visual programming language allows users and developers to create programs by manipulating program elements graphically. Several studies have shown the benets of visual languages for learning purposes and their applicability to robot programming. However, at present, there are not enough comparative studies on the suitability of textual and visua...

Flip-GET has been developed with the objective of optimizing engineering practicals. The innovative element of this methodology is the use of serious games, as a complement to the flipped classroom method, in the teaching-learning process of engineering studies. This methodology uses serious games to take advantage of the capacity of motivation tha...

A diferencia de otras áreas, que cuentan con una larga tradición en la realización de TFGs, en España las áreas de Humanidades empezaron hace solo unos años, a raíz de la adaptación al plan Bolonia, a incluir en sus titulaciones la realización obligatoria de TFGs. Con el objetivo de compartir y debatir nuestra propia experiencia con otros docentes...

Wikis are appropriate tools for deploying authentic assessment experiences for learning and work scenarios in which a group of users are asked to develop a shared task. However, when the number of wiki users increases, the number of contributions can grow at a pace whereby accurately assessing them becomes a complex and non-scalable task. While dif...

Systematic literature reviews and mapping studies are useful research methods used to lay the foundations of further research. These methods are widely used in the Health Sciences and, more recently, also in Computer Science. Despite existing tool support for systematic reviews, more automation is required to conduct the complete process. This pape...

When exploring big amounts of data without a clear target, providing an interactive experience becomes really difficult, since this tentative inspection usually defeats any early decision on data structures or indexing strategies. This is also true on the physics domain, specifically on high energy physics, where the huge volume of data generated b...

In recent years, 360º videos combined with virtual reality (VR) techniques have been used to recreate highly interactive and immersive environments, allowing its users to directly experience and interact with its content and environment. Unlike traditional video recordings, which usually provide a very restrictive perspective of an object, person o...

Wikis are well known systems to support collaborative assignments. They provide a digital platform for asynchronous collaboration between students under the monitoring of a supervisor. Additionally, as all the students interactions are recorded in the wiki database, teachers can retrieve interesting data for skill assessment. On the one hand, there...

Wikis are well known systems to support collaborative assignments. They provide a digital platform for asynchronous collaboration between students under the monitoring of a supervisor. Additionally, as all the students interactions are recorded in the wiki database, teachers can retrieve interesting data for skill assessment. On the one hand, there...

The appropriate categorisation of written information by health professionals is very important to guarantee its accessibility. Unfortunately, the information technology tools that support professionals on that task imply a heavy workload, so that the responsibility for categorising the written content is often delegated to administrative staff. We...

The incorporation of mobile applications in educational environments generates a large amount of information resulting from the interaction of students with these applications. The analysis of this information can be of significant importance. The teacher may find it useful, as it can help them to make decisions or to assess the process of teaching...

The performance in generic skills is increasingly important for organizations to succeed in the current competitive environment. However, assessing the level of performance in generic skills of the members of an organization is a challenging task, subject to both subjectivity and scalability issues. Organizations usually lay their organizational le...

A Higher Education degree is composed by courses which can be organized in areas or modules. Over last years, time invested by students to complete Higher Education degrees has increased. This increment can be caused by the existence of bottlenecks in the courses of academic programs. We aim to carry out an analysis of students’ performance to dete...

Pseudocode is one of the recommended methods for teaching students to design algorithms. Having a tool that performs the automatic translation of an algorithm in pseudocode to a programming language would allow the student to understand the complete process of program development. In addition, the introduction of quality measurement of algorithms d...

The incorporation of mobile applications in diverse environments generates a large amount of information resulting from the interaction of users with these mobile applications. The analysis of this information can facilitate decision-making or evaluation of the process for the professionals, allowing for improved results or the detection of certain...

The representation of musical information through notation systems is a process of multidimensional nature, of high complexity , and which is subject to a practically infinite level of casuistry. The translation of these processes into the digital domain has meant an unprecedented revolution for the recording and dissemination of musical informatio...

The incorporation of specific mobile applications in various disciplines can be very useful. However, the content of these applications may be subject to updates that the developer should perform manually. The use of linked data sources can be a possible solution to this problem, making the content of the applications dynamically updated. Neverthel...

Students’ acquisition of generic skills is key to their incorporation into the job world. However, teachers encounter several difficulties when measuring their students’ performance in generic skills. These difficulties increase in online courses based on learning management systems where there is no direct contact between teachers and their studen...

One of the most valuable skills for teachers is the ability to produce their own digital solutions, translating teaching concepts into end-user computer systems. This often requires the involvement of computing specialists. As a result, the development of educational programming environments remains a challenge. Learning experiences based multimoda...

The acquisition of foreign language competencies has become one of the main concerns of current ICT educational policies. Mobile smart devices allow teachers to provide students with personalized learning environments in line with their needs. However, most of the available apps, especially in the area of foreign language learning, still focus on f...

El proceso de Bolonia, materializado en el Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES), ha supuesto la incorporación de nuevas capacidades y destrezas a los itinerarios educativos universitarios. Así, las directivas que emanan este proceso promueven, además de una mayor involucración de los estudiantes en su propio proceso formativo, el desarrollo...

Serious games are video games with educational purposes. Players interact in many points during a gameplay. These interactions can be registered, producing data sets with sequence of events which provide relevant information about player's skills. Unfortunately, traditional skill assessment methods present limitations to carry out a detailed analys...

In recent years, several visual programming languages and tools are emerging, which allow young students to easily program applications. Particularly, the block-based language used by Scratch has been the standard in most school initiatives to introduce Computational thinking (CT) in courses unrelated to computing. However, CT competences are not s...

La creciente expansión de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC) no solo ha creado nuevos modelos de comunicación e interacción, sino también de enseñanza-aprendizaje. En la enseñanza de idiomas esto se ha plasmado en el uso de ordenadores como soporte para el aprendizaje (CALL) y, más recientemente, en el uso de dispositivos móv...

La incorporación de aplicaciones móviles en entornos educativos genera una gran cantidad de información resultante de la interacción de los estudiantes con estas aplicaciones. El análisis de esta información puede ser de gran utilidad para el docente, ya que le puede facilitar la toma de decisiones o la valoración del proceso de enseñanza/aprendiza...

Virtual Worlds (VWs) have been widely used to support learning processes. One main advantage is providing valuable data on student behaviour and interaction. Nonetheless, most platforms provide only limited access to student logs. Moreover, accessing logs usually requires technical skills most teachers do not have. In this context, the authors pres...

In a context where language classrooms are plagued by high enrolment numbers and limited contact hours—hence, low exposure to the target language—we started exploring the possibility of designing a mobile learning system to provide students with additional language practice beyond the classroom. In this paper the authors share their experience with...

Serious games are games with an educational purpose. In these games, players develop their skills by facing a number of challenges, and students are assessed according to their game playing behaviour. Assessment of serious game-based learning experiences has to take into account diverse features as game genre, pedagogical aim or game context. This...