Monika Mladenović

University of Split · Faculty of Science

The IT workforce has been growing steadily in popularity and demand among parts of the global workforce for decades. Consequently, introducing informatics as a separate school subject has already become indispensable. Therefore, the education of informatics teachers is also compulsory. Informatics teachers should educate students in all aspects of...

During the outbreak of the pandemic COVID -19, education was also affected in many countries. The switch from traditional to online schooling began with no preparation time for teachers or students and the necessary information technology (IT) preparation for online education. Therefore, informatics education and Informatics teachers became essenti...

Background and Context Most studies about programming misconceptions are conducted at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since the age level for starting learning programming is getting lower, there is a need for determining programming misconceptions for younger learners. Objective Our goal is to determine programming misconceptions and their...

Programming misconceptions have been a known issue for programming novices since the beginning of programming education. During the learning process, students develop mental models about programming concepts they learn. Programming misconceptions occur when students develop incorrect mental models. Several factors can contribute to developing or pr...

As in almost all aspects of life, the COVID-19 pandemic had a strong impact on the educational systems across the world. Most countries shifted schools to the form of distance learning. In Croatia, schools went completely online from March 2020 until the end of the 2019/2020 school year. Such an urgent transition impacted the whole educational syst...

COVID-19 pandemic caused the school's transition from face-to-face to completely online in Croatia from March 2020, as in many other countries worldwide. However, such a sudden transition did not leave a preparation time for fulfilling all technical prerequisites for conducting distance learning. Informatics as a separate school subject became an i...

Učenje i poučavanje algoritama sortiranja je vrlo zahtjevno kako za učitelja tako i za učenike. Problem može biti još veći kada se nastava u cijelosti provodi u online okruženju što je bio slučaj u Republici Hrvatskoj od sredine ožujka do kraja školske godine 2019/20 zbog COVID-19 pandemije. Korištenje alata za vizualizaciju može pomoći u spuštanju...

Since its beginnings in the 1970s, learning to program is a challenging task for learners and educators. In the last two decades, many attempts were made to increase learning programming’s popularity, resulting in the development of block-based programming languages (BPL), widely used to engage children in programming from an early age. The use of...

Novices enrolled in introductory programming courses often face many difficulties. These difficulties are more emphasized when novices are K–12 students. Many new visual programming languages have primarily been designed to provide a smooth introduction to programming for children. However, at some point, a general‐purpose text‐based programming la...

Informatics (Computer science) is becoming an essential discipline for existing jobs, and more importantly, jobs that still do not exist. An important issue in Informatics is the underrepresentation of the women within the field. Although most studies show small or no differences in abilities between genders, the women are still one of the most und...

Block-based programming languages are becoming a favourite learning tool for programming novices while the traditional way of teaching programming mostly uses text-based programming languages. The purpose of this study was to compare the impact of used visual and textual programming languages on K-12 students' understanding of the loop concept. Par...

Block-based programming languages are becoming a favourite learning tool for programming novices while the traditional way of teaching programming mostly uses text-based programming languages. The purpose of this study was to compare the impact of used visual and textual programming languages on K-12 students' understanding of the loop concept. Par...

As computing today is included in many fields, there are many efforts, by science or national communities, to engage K-12 students in programming through national curriculums, many movements, and new programming tools. However, teaching introductory programming is not as successful as we would like it to be. Various assessments of student knowledge...

Programming is a highly wanted occupation in the market. There is a need for lowering the age level for learning programming in education in order to develop students' digital literacy but also digital fluency. There are a worldwide trend and many initiatives for lowering the age for learning programming resulting in implementing new computing curr...

There are known misconceptions about variables which are mostly the same since the first studies since more than 30 years ago. Consciousness about the misconceptions in programming can be crucial for teaching and learning programming for novices because, if we are aware of them, maybe we can minimise or even prevent them. Researchers mostly conduct...

Novice programmers are facing many difficulties while learning to program. Most studies about misconceptions in programming are conducted at the undergraduate level, yet there is a lack of studies at the elementary school (K-12) level, reasonably because computer science neither programming are regularly still not the part of elementary school curr...

The link between problem-solving and programming skills is well known. Students with higher problem-solving abilities find programming easy and they can master programming with no or little difficulties regardless of the programming environment. On the contrary, students with lower problem-solving abilities find programming difficult to understand...

In the Republic of Croatia Informatics is an elective course in elementary school for students from 5th to 8th grade. When it comes to programming language teachers can choose between BASIC and Logo. There are a lot of new programming environments for learning and teaching programming like Scratch and also new ways of teaching programming like game...

Cilj rada je ispitati predznanje studenata prve godine o internetu. Predmet Informatika provodi se kao izvannastavna aktivnost u razrednoj nastavi i kao izborni predmet u višim razredima osnovne škole. U srednjoj školi predmet se provodi ovisno o vrsti srednjoškolskoga obrazovanja. Zbog raznolikosti u broju školskih sati koje su studenti odslušali...

Learning programming is difficult and it presents a great challenge for both students and teachers. The goal is to increase success rate for novice programmers. Students lose their confidence and motivation when they encounter difficulties such as programming environment, language syntax knowledge, problem understanding and debugging. Programming l...

There's no more doubt that computers and technology have become part of modern human environment. It is hard to find profession in modern society that doesn't rely on informatics. Despite that schools do not follow these changes properly. Digital literacy and informatics (computer science is commonly used in the USA) should be essential components...

Job market is increasingly demanding jobs in all fields of Computer science. Besides that, most jobs require computer literacy and computer fluency. Students should get these skills through elementary education. In the Republic of Croatia computer science is part of informatics course which is elective course for students from 5th to 8th grade. Bec...

Regardless of the fact that the demand for jobs requiring the knowledge and skills associated to computers has constantly outpaced the growth in the supply all over the world, satisfactory solution to the problem has not been found, resulting in continuous (gap between supply and demand) negative trend. The problem mentioned is particularly highlig...

In the last few years, student competitions in knowledge of certain area have become very common in elementary schools. Students can compete in one or more school subjects depending on their interest and abilities. One of the goals of every competition is to raise the motivation in learning particular area. Very often, that motivation, in great dea...

Sažetak U ovom radu razmatraju se temeljne postavke problemskog programiranja utemeljene na pregledu relevantne literature te dugogodišnjeg programerskog i nastavnog iskustva autora. U prvom dijelu razmatraju se kriteriji koji se koriste za poučavanje programiranja i računalne znanosti općenito i to kroz povijesnu prizmu pristupa ovoj problematici....