Ilkka Jormanainen

A survey of resources for introducing coding into schools

Within TACCLE 3 -- Coding European Union Erasmus+ KA2 Programme project, a review and evaluation of a set of resources that can contribute to teaching programming to younger children has made. This paper presents a survey of this review including the most outstanding products in order to help teachers to introduce programming in pre-university studies.

Science festivals on computer science recruitment

SciFest is a festival of science, technology, and environmental issues. It attracts annually 6000 school children, student, teacher, and public audience to learn and make innovations together with experts from various fields. Workshops from Computer Science and other IT-related fields have been very popular in science festivals, and this provides possibilities also for student recruitment.

Making Construals as a New Digital Skill: Dissolving the Program - and the Programmer - Interface

Making a construal is a way of using the computer to help us in making sense of a situation. Its merits as a new digital skill for developing open educational resources in the constructionist tradition are illustrated using a basic construal of shopping activity. Making construals is the central theme of the three year EU Erasmus+ CONSTRUIT! project. This paper takes the form of an introductory tutorial highlighting key qualities of construals that will shape the CONSTRUIT! agenda.

An open approach for learning educational data mining

The Open Monitoring Environment (OME) allows a teacher to monitor, model and, thus, understand, the learning process based on the real data rising from an educational robotics class. The OME uses a novel educational data mining approach where teachers are empowered to create rules to extract pedagogically and contextually meaningful patterns of actions from a raw data flow. The OME has been tested in various educational robotics settings and our results indicate that the data mining approach in the OME is easily accessible even for users who are not computer science experts. We propose that the OME could be utilized in computer science education as a platform for empirical, hands-on approach for teaching and learning educational data mining.

Theater robotics for human technology education

Theater robotics allows its users to learn by transforming a story into a theatrical performance acted out by robots. A preliminary implementation uses affordable robotics kits controlled by a scripting environment that was designed iteratively by observing the users from the viewpoint of a given set of criteria. The end result facilitates a truly interdisciplinary learning experience that combines two types of artifacts: robots built with technology and engineering, and stories founded on humanities. Theater robotics can be applied not only in technology or robotics education, but also in computing education to teach specific skills such as computational thinking or basic concepts of programming with robots.

Supporting Teacher Intervention in Unpredictable Learning Environments

Modern teaching tools, such as educational robotics, require new learning environments. The teacher especially needs to be supported in novel ways. Conflative learning environment is based on the agents collecting data from the learning process. The teacher can build a support environment based on his or her empirical observations from the classroom. An implementation of the conflative learning environment is described and two case studies about the use of system are reported. The results show that agents are useful and efficient in data collection, and that the Empirical Modelling environment can be used to construct the working classroom models.

An Open Monitoring Environment for primary school children engaged in tablet-based learning

The current trend of tablet computers as learning tools in the classroom places extra demands on the teacher. Learning environments are needed which enable the teacher to monitor the progress of their students and to receive alerts when particular students are encountering difficulties. In this paper we develop a support environment for teachers using tablets in primary school first year education. The environment is based on existing research into an Open Monitoring Environment that enables the teacher to explore and elaborate a model of student progress. Using the data collected from science activities on tablets in a Thai school, the developed system offers teachers insight into the state of the learning progress of students. An example visualisation is provided that can help the teacher to explore which students are progressing well and which students are having difficulty. Furthermore, the unique quality of the environment is in its flexibility to extend the model with new visualisations or metrics in order to better understand the learning activity.

A Framework for Research on Technology-Enhanced Special Education

Based on results from the technologies for children with individual needs project and two case projects, we propose a new multidisciplinary framework for research between computer science, educational technology, and special education. The framework presents a way to conduct research that aims at developing new methods for technology-enhanced special education and for developing adaptable software and hardware tools for individual needs in educational settings.

Implementation of Intelligent Agents with Mobility in Educational Robotics Settings

Teachers working in robotics classes face a major problem: how to keep track of individual students? or even small groups? progress in a class of 30-40 students. A multi-agent environment to help teachers with this problem is based on having pedagogical agents to monitor students? interaction, robots? movements, and the construction and programming process of robots. Mobile interaction agents move in network delivering agents? observations to teacher?s visualization agent. Results of a linguistic analysis show the possible problems in educational robotics settings where the proposed agent-based system could help.

Using JS-Eden to introduce the concepts of reinforcement learning and artificial neural networks

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and it is widely taught as a part of computing degrees. Machine learning is an umbrella concept for a wide range of different algorithms and approaches, and it is often considered a difficult subject to teach. Machine learning systems work usually in a black box where only inputs and outputs of algorithms are visible to the user. This might cause difficulties for a learner to interpret and comprehend how the algorithm works. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to demonstrate and teach machine learning concepts by turning the black box into a white box with JS-Eden, which is an Empirical Modelling platform for creating open-ended and interactive open educational resources (construals) with Eden modelling language. A specifically developed JS-Eden plugin for physical computing follows white-box approach and it enables a user to import an implementation of a machine learning algorithm to the environment and interact with the algorithm in an unusual way.