Culturally Diverse Approaches to Learning Mathematics and Computational Thinking

Educators’ experience shows that learning programming is in many aspects problematic for novice software engineering students. On the other hand, software engineering processes and the view of programming has been changing during the recent years. In this paper, we address socio-cognitive aspects of computer science and software engineering in order to contribute to programming education enhancement: the research is focused on students’ temperament style and favorite programming learning activities. The study of 158 first and second year students, studying programming specialties in five higher education institutions, has been presented. The “psychological portrait” of the surveyed students reflects the evolution of the temperament style in programming during last decades. The attitudes towards the programming activities, presented in this paper, may contribute to the development of enhancement of existing programming courses in higher education.

We study the influence of students' self and time management skills to their attitude to the inverted CS2 4 th semester pilot course offering, which took place in Vilnius University of the Applied Sciences. We compared students' attitudes to the inverted offering just after the course started and no self and time management tool has not yet been introduced and after the self and time management tool has already been introduced to the students and students gained their experience in using the tool. Confirming our hypothesis, we found out the positive shift of students' attitudes to the inverted offering. The effectiveness of the simple self and time management tool was confirmed as well. INTRODUCTION Flipped learning Flipped or inverted learning becomes more and more popular with increasing attention from the part of educators and scientists. It seems to be natural, as modern technologies like Web2.0, visualization, gamification, and e-learning empower students with strong self studying abilities including learning content as well as outstanding self studying environments. On the other side, the modern industry provides on-demand requirements for the educational content; herewith the students' ability to become the self-learners is as well important and better valued than other abilities and competences. The general idea or "a guiding principle of the flipped classroom is that work typically done as homework (e.g., problem solving, essay writing) is better undertaken in class with the guidance of the instructor. Listening to lecture or watching videos is better accomplished at home. Hence the term flipped or inverted classroom." [3]. Advantages and disadvantages As any new technology, the inverted offering has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Among advantages Fulton [1] reports on: students' possibilities to move at the own pace, which is also important and for not native language speakers; deeper teachers' insight on students' difficulties as homework is done in class; curriculum could be easily customized; students are supported with distance learning possibilities, what allow them to combine out of the class and leaning activities. At the same time, there are several problems identified by teachers [3]: students must be active at home; the course must be carefully prepared and include visual and interactive materials. Flipped learning in CS education CS education requires new and innovative methods to be involved in. The demand for educated professionals in the field is increasing with the time. On the other hand, this is a traditionally difficult field to study and for many students a sufficient literacy level is a challenge. Lockwood and Rachel [5] report on inverted introductory CS course. The inverted classroom includes online workbooks, guided problem solving activities, lab exercises, homework, and exams. Horton et al. [4] report on positive results of inverted CS1 course which took place in the University of Toronto. The authors report on significant increase in students' final course outcomes comparing with a traditional CS1 course. Walker et al. [8], [7] introduce a lab-based approach to CS1 course. The method is based on extended amount

OLYMPIADS IN INFORMATICS, founded in 2007, was initiated by International Olympiad in Informatics community in cooperation with Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (now Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics). Contributions are invited from researchers all over the world. OLYMPIADS IN INFORMATICS is a refereed scholarly journal that provides an international forum for presenting research and developments in the specific scope of teaching and learning informatics through olympiads and other competitions. The journal is focused on the research and practice of professionals who are working in the field of teaching and learning informatics to talented student.

INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION is a peer-reviewed journal that provides an international forum for presenting the latest original research results and developments in the fields of informatics (computer science or computing as well depends on terminology used within different countries) and education. The journal will promote making contacts among researchers in informatics and practical educators both in the Baltic countries and that in Eastern and Central Europe where a distinctive methodology of teaching and learning informatics has been developed and is of great interest. INFORMATICS IN EDUCATION is abstracted/indexed by: Mathematics Education Database (MathEduc) Cabell Publishing Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies (CCSB) DBLP Computer Science Bibliography DOAJ EBSCO Elsevier Bibliographic Databases (SCOPUS) Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) Infobase Index INSPEC PASCAL Database (INIST-CNRS) ProQuest Research Bible ROAD Scientific Indexing Services Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection (Emerging Sources Citation Index) VINITI (All-Russian Scientific and Technical Information Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences)

Educators' experience shows that learning programming is in many aspects problematic for novice software engineering students. On the other hand, software engineering processes and the view of programming has been changing during the recent years. In this paper, we address socio-cognitive aspects of computer science and software engineering in order to contribute to programming education enhancement: the research is focused on students' temperament style and favorite programming learning activities. The study of 158 first and second year students, studying programming specialties in five higher education institutions, has been presented. The "psychological portrait" of the surveyed students reflects the evolution of the temperament style in programming during last decades. The attitudes towards the programming activities, presented in this paper, may contribute to the development of enhancement of existing programming courses in higher education.

The paper examines the modern computer-based educational environment and the requirements of the possible cognitive interface that enables the learner’s cognitive grounding by incorporating abductive reasoning into the educational process. Although the main emphasis is on cognitive and physiological aspects, the practical tools for enabling computational thinking in a modern constructionist educational environment are discussed. The presented analytical material and developed solutions are aimed at education with computers. However, the proposed solutions can be generalized in order to create a computer-free educational environment. The generalized paradigm here is pragmatism, considered as a philosophical assumption. By designing and creating a pragmatist educational environment, a common way of organizing computational thinking that enables constructionist educational solutions can be found.

In this paper, we present the methodology for the introduction to scientific computing based on model-centered learning. We propose multiphase queueing systems as a basis for learning objects. We use Python and parallel programming for implementing the models and present the computer code and results of stochastic simulations.

During past years computational thinking (CT) is being actively promoted through the K-12 curriculum, higher education, contests and other activities. CT skills are important for further students’ educational and professional career. The paper presents a study conducted among the first year software engineering students, learning a structured programming (SP) course. As an instrument to measure CT skills, the test consisted of preselected Bebras contest tasks was developed and validated. The correlation between the test resuls and the SP course results was investigated.

During the recent years computational thinking has been actively promoted through the K-12 curriculum, higher education, contests, and many other initiatives. Computational thinking skills are important for a further students' educational and professional career. Our focus is on computational thinking for software engineering novice students, a term meant to encompass a set of concepts and thought processes that are helpful in formulating problems and their solutions. Annually organized international challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking ''Bebras'' has developed many tasks to promote deep thinking skills in this area. It is important to motivate students to solve various informatics or computer science tasks and evaluate their computational thinking abilities. The paper presents a study conducted among first-year students of software engineering, studying the structured programming course. As aninstrument to measure computational thinking, a test of internationally approved and well-preselected tasks from the ''Bebras'' challenge has been suggested and validated. The correlation between the students' test results and the structured programming course results has been investigated. We conclude with a discussion and future directions to enhance computational thinking skills of novice software engineering students.