Gabor Kiss

A Comparison of Programming Skills by Genders of Hungarian Grammar School Students

Experiences show that boys are developing programming skills easier than girls in higher education. An analysis of programming skills by gender in secondary grammar schools was made with the help of a web based Informatics Test. After composing an on-line test on the base of the National Curriculum I analysed how effectively can students of different grades answer questions dealing with different subjects. From different towns of Hungary over 60 teachers used the test to see the knowledge level of more than 1000 students having answered these questions. After the evaluation of the test results the correctness of the original presumption emerged. First the Kolmogorov-Smirnov-test was used to see if the groups showed standard normal distribution in answering the questions. The means of the correct answers by gender were examined using a Z-test with two parameters and the deviation quotient was to calculated revealing how much gender influences the difference of means. Significance level was 5% through the analysis. Significant divergence by gender was found regarding programming skills showing the hypothesis correct in this two area. Students have to put everything in source code when learning programming. It seems this method is more favourable for boys. Girls have problems finding syntax errors in source code or understand it at all. I looks it would be better to teach girls with different tools using primitive building elements to write programs so when changing the parameters of these building elements no syntax errors would occur.

Experiences in teaching data concealment and data encryption to engineering undergraduates

Students of the undergraduate course Introduction to Informatics get acquainted with the most prevalent methods of data concealment (steganography) and data encryption in history as well as with up to date applications. To teach Cryptography and Steganography is complicated, because you need to plot figures and tables at the blackboard plus calculating the frequency of characters in the text is consuming a lot of work and time. Concealing information within pictures or voices is impossible to show on the blackboard and you can only partially explain how to apply the LSB (least significant bit) technique. Therefore I have devised some applications which are appropriate to show all these algorithms. I wanted to know the usefulness of all the programs I wrote and an excellent opportunity presented itself by the big number of admitted new students. These engineering students attended my lectures held at different dates in two groups. In the first group of lectures I presented and used the programs described above while the lectures for the second group were delivered without these materials. An analysis of the results (Levene test) showed the variance of the two groups different (p<0,05). In this case the means could be compared with Welchs t test. This showed a difference between the means (p<0,05): the mean of the results of students attending the multimedia lectures were better by one mark than the results of the other group where lectures were delivered without multimedia presentations. Calculating the Eta-squared I tried to make percentable the effect of the programs presented based on the result of the papers written and got a surprising 32%. This means a moderately strong correlation existing between the programs and presentations used throughout the lectures of the term and the results of the papers written by the students at the end of term.

Measuring student's computer science knowledge at the end of the primary stage in Hungary

Computer science knowledge in the 8th grade in Hungary was analysed, in order to see the differences in informatics skills of students from different school types. The students knowledge should be level with each other at the end of primary stage, not depending on school type, because their learning material is based on the National Curriculum: this was the starting hypothesis. Why is this important? Because teachers at grammar schools have to know the knowledge of entering students; what have they to teach for all of them, do they have to group students according to their knowledge level, is there any difference in knowledge level by school types, if so, does it require a special course to smooth differences or not? An analysis of informatics skills by schooltypes in primary stages was made with the help of a web based Informatics Test. An on-line test based on the Hungarian National Curriculum was composed, and answers were analysed how effectively could students from different grades deal with different subjects. Over 60 teachers used the test to measure the knowledge level of more than 1000 students from various towns of Hungary. This time only those answers were needed which came from the 8th grade. After evaluating the test results the correctness of the original presumption emerged. First the Kolmogorov-Smirnov-test was used to see if the results of the various groups showed standard normal distribution or not. The means of the correct answers by school types were examined using an Independent samples tests and the calculated Eta-squared revealed how school types influenced the differences of means. Significance level was 5% throughout the analysis. Significant divergence by school types was not found showing the original hypothesis correct. Further, some differences were found between the taught material and that of the National Curriculum.

The survey measuring the informatics skills of the entering students at Budapest Tech, Bánki Donát Faculty of Mechanical and Safety Engineering

I asked the students to fill out a web based Informatics Test on the first week of the semester. This test was supposed to show the level of their computer knowledge which can be the basic in higher education. The results show the students do not get all the cognition that is specified in the National Ground Curriculum, for instance they have obtrusive lacks in the field of programming, database management, which should be compensated in higher education without relying on previous studies. According to the comparison of the three majors of the faculty it becomes obvious there is no correlation between the informatics skills and the applied major.

Using the Lego-Mindstorm kit in German Computer Science Education

In Germany in all Region the Educational System is different and the computer science Education is different too. Computer science is obligatory at the high school in Bavaria and in Saxony, in the other Regions just selectable. In spite of the big difference between various regions, the Lego-Mindstorm is widely used at all educational level. The students are very motivated, because the movement of the Robot shows, how they succeeded in writing a good program. The Lego-Minstorms kit can be used from the 5th grade to the University level.

Multicultural pragmatic learning through total students' engagement

This paper presents the technology used and the way introduced at the multicultural school of Athens enabling Learning Through Engagement (LTE). We are describing our efforts to shift from traditional learning plans and programs to attention-grabbing learning by teaching and having our students develop thematic sites, wiki content, and animations in parallel to schools efforts to develop learning games.

Using web conference system during the lessons in higher education

The goal of this research was an analysis to see the using of the web conference system as a presentation tool is productive or not. The experience shows the majority of the students do not visit the presentations at the universities, just download the learning material and try to take a successful exam, but they do not have too much chance to pass it. First of all I wanted to see how many students take part in the virtual and traditional presentations respectively and I observed that the virtual way was preferred (~80% of students) to the classical way (~30-40%). The students in the first group were more motivated; they took this opportunity rather than the conventional educational method. My starting hypothesis was that the group where I used the web conference system as a presentation tool would achieve better results in the papers. After the evaluation of the paper results the correctness of the original presumption seemed to be proved. Significance level was 5% through the analysis. It was found significant divergence in the knowledge of the students taking part in the virtual presentations and that of the students using the traditional way. The students could get half mark better paper results when they followed the virtual lesson. Consequently, the use of the web conference system as a presentation tool is productive; the students follow the presentations with more motivation to use this new tool in their studies and get better results when writing papers.

Using Smartphones in Healthcare and to Save Lives

Nowadays the use of smart phones gets more and more widespread in the whole world. How could smart phones be used to make lives healthier? Smart phones could get to know when people were jogging, walking, travelling and standing on the basis of the GPS co-ordinates and the measured speed and could calculate the time spent relaxing with the help of a gyroscope. Portable sensors that are able to communicate wireless could provide further data about the momentary state of health and the need for fluid and calories. A smart phone could recognize the sudden change of the bodily position and could decide on the level of the seriousness of the situation by evaluating the values measured by the sensors. It is also worth sending a message to the ambulance if the fall is the consequence of losing consciousness, the measured data, the patients condition and GPS positions can be life-saving information. In case of the indisposition of a driver, a smart phone could send instructions to the vehicle to take over the control from him and not to allow him to use the steering wheel or the pedals, the vehicle itself is to use them properly. It is to switch on the hazard warning flasher and the phone will drive the vehicle off the road to its edge while gradually decreasing the speed and paying attention to the position and the movements of the surrounding vehicles, objects, people and other living creatures. In the meantime the phone could also call the ambulance and send information about the precise location and the measured data. It might happen that the heart of a patient stops beating while driving or in other circumstances or that it beats so fast that it can not pump the blood. In such cases a smart phone could realize the problem with the help of a pulse counter (sphygmograph) and could make an attempt to resuscitate the patient with the defibrillator attached to it.

Level of the information security awareness of the mechanical engineering students

Aim of this research to analysing the level of the information security awareness of the undergraduate mechanical engineering students after the second semester. The access of the internet is easier day by day. My personal experience shows the young generation use smartphones, tablets to keep in contact with friends at home, on public transport, in the school etc. except sleeping. They use different communication forms like community sides, chat rooms and so on. These applications are protected by password authentication system to keep save the data of the users. I was interested for which systems find the mechanical engineering students important in everyday life and what kind of password use for protecting the information. Why is it important? We see almost in every month in the news a service provider was attacked again by hackers and the have put the username and the passwords on the Internet. The success of the attack depends on user error mainly. The companies store sometimes the important data without any protection. On the other hand the users share sensitive information on the community sites (“I am going to a party today evening”, “I am on holiday by the see” it means my home is empty tonight if I leave alone). I find the information security is a very important question today when we use lot of systems and we store the important information on devices, in cloud and so on. We have to know how can protect our information so I thought the basics of the information security in subject Informatics I. for the mechanical engineering students in the first semester because they do not have any subject which would include information about this topic. The students filled out an information security awareness questionnaire after the second semester. The multidimensional analysis shows which communication systems are more important to the students. These communications systems are protected by password authentication it means the next step of the analysis how long and how complicated password are used by students after the basic information security course in the first semester. The students had to say, how long password they are using by the most important systems like e-mail, community sites, and so on. The longer password is safer then shorter as we know. The following important question is how complicated is the used password. Is it include just lowercase letters, or include some uppercase letters too? Is it include maybe numbers or special characters like “;” or “,”? We need to know some more information about the used passwords. How often change the students these passwords? Are they using same passwords by different systems or one same password? In that case if they use same password it is more important to be the password complicated in other case if it is hacked, the attackers can log on in other systems too what the students use. After the analysis I could see how effective was the basic information security course for the mechanical engineering students. How could I build the information security awareness by them? Was it enough, or should I waste more time on this topic to help them to keep save the sensitive data?

Dependence Pedagogy in a Multicultural School

This paper presents our efforts to introduce Dependence Pedagogy in the Multicultural School of Athens. We are developing and exploring Dependence Pedagogy paradigm in relation to the Reusability concept introducing different groups, behaviors and actions in such a way that the output of some is the input to others. Dependence Pedagogy is a valuable concept as defines that synergy in a multicultural refugee school environment is hard but at the same time it is a dynamic and promising path for creating a prosperous learning society formed by different cultures.