Piroska Biró

First Year Students’ Algorithmic Skills in Tertiary Computer Science Education

Faculties of Informatics are facing the problem in Hungary that students starting their tertiary education in Computer Sciences do not have a satisfactory level of algorithmic skills, their knowledge seems superficial, and the dropout rate is extremely high in these courses. We have launched a project to test how students’ algorithmic skills have been developed in their primary and secondary education, how students evaluate their knowledge. The test proved that an extremely high percentage of the students arrive at the Faculty of Informatics with underdeveloped algorithmic skills, with unreliable knowledge, and they do not consider the recently emerged, non-traditional environments as programming tools and facilities for developing algorithmic skills.

Utilizing Sprego and Sprego contents

In this paper we detail how Sprego can be adapted both in mathematics and other school subjects. Sprego is a programming approach in spreadsheet environments, which utilizes the concept of function developed in mathematics classes. Sprego also offers an opportunity to practice and develop knowledge in the subjects of n-ary and composite functions, which are currently considered high level mathematics. Beyond the obvious connection between Sprego and mathematics, the authentic-table-concept of Sprego provides other subjects with a simple programming environment for data retrieval.

Teachers and the interactive whiteboards

The spread of IWB (Interactive WhiteBoard) around the world changes, reforms and modernizes the traditional teaching methods. We can find these new ICT devices in more and more schools in Hungary as well and the use of it is getting widespread in everyday teaching. The teachers have the greatest role in the proper use of IWB during the lessons and they are also responsible for providing students with creative and motivating tasks lesson by lesson. In the following research, the advantages of the IWB are highlighted, the difficulties of its usage and the teachers’ attitude towards the new ICT devices by asking 205 teachers from different primary and secondary schools. The results are mainly based on questionnaires.