Einari Kurvinen

Redesigning an Object-Oriented Programming Course

Educational technology offers several potential benefits for programming education. Still, to facilitate the technology properly, integration into a course must be carefully designed. In this article, we present a redesign of an object-oriented university-level programming course. In the redesign, a collaborative education tool was utilized to enhance active learning, facilitate communication between students and teachers, and remodel the evaluation procedure by utilizing automatically assessed tasks. The redesign was based on the best practices found in our own earlier research and that of the research community, with a focus on facilitating active learning methods and student collaboration. The redesign was evaluated by comparing two instances of the redesigned course against two instances using the old methodology. The drop-out rate decreased statistically significantly in the redesigned course instances. Moreover, there was a trend toward higher grade averages in the redesigned instances. Based on the results, we can conclude that the utilization of educational technology has a highly positive effect on student performance. Still, making major changes to course methodology does not come without certain difficulties. Hence, we also present our experiences and suggestions for the course redesign to help other educators and researchers perform similar design changes.

Interactive Exercises for Teaching Logic Circuits

Logic circuits are a central concept in understanding how computers and electronics work underneath. While there are educational, web-based systems for visualizing and building circuits, few systems exist which are capable of providing automatically assessed exercises with visual feedback on the topic. In this paper, we describe the lechef library for providing exercises on logic circuits. The library supports two types of exercises: 1) giving students a logic circuit and the input to the circuit asking them to give the input and output values for each gate in the circuit, and 2) giving students a truth table of the wanted circuit and requiring them to construct a circuit fulfilling the requirements. Furthermore, we explain how we integrated it into the ViLLE learning environment and used it on our introductory computer science course. We also report on our initial findings on student experiences on using the exercises as well as their results. We believe the system and our experiences provide valuable feedback to other members of the community on how and why to use such exercises.