Algebra has been identified as a gatekeeper to careers in STEM, but little research exists on how algebra appears for practitioners in the workplace. Surveys and interviews were conducted with 77 STEM practitioners from a variety of fields, examining how they reported using algebraic functions in their work. Survey and interview reports suggest…

Virtual resources team up to create a computational grid, which is used in computation-intensive problem solving. A majority of these problems require high performance resources to compute and generate results, making grid computation another type of high performance computing. The optimization in computational grids relates to resource…

Guided play activities were developed so that coding clubs could promote computational thinking skills in preschool children. The clubs involved fifteen children aged between 2 and 4 years, including a group of children with communication difficulties. The children took part in an action-research scoping study over three coding clubs involving six…

The purpose of this study is to introduce a developed activity which is named "CityMap" and to present an example of the implementation and evaluation process of a computer science unplugged activity through this activity. The aim of this activity is to write algorithms of going from one place to another using step by step instructions.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present computational algorithms as potential bearers of biases and also tools for reflection, and to advance strategies for engaging with them in education. Design/methodology/approach: Three example games (Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, FreeCiv) are provided for introducing algorithms as meaningful and…

The Computational Thinking recently has been recognised as one of the basic knowledge to be developed since childhood. Coding and computers are not just programming, but tools that help students to develop problem solving skills and more deep understand of the way things work. For these reasons, great attention has been focused on this topic both…

Research indicates that understanding levels of abstraction (LOA) and being able to move between the levels is essential to programming success. For K-5 contexts we rename the LOA levels: problem, design, code and running the code. In our qualitative exploratory study, we interviewed five K-5 teachers on their uses of LOA, particularly the design…

Within the framework of the Testing Algorithmic and Application Skills project we tested first year students of Informatics at the beginning of their tertiary education. We were focusing on the students' level of understanding in different programming environments. In the present paper we provide the results from the University of Debrecen, the…

Little research exists on young children's beliefs about mathematics, and current research perspectives on early mathematical activity may overlook a great deal of young children's sophisticated mathematical thinking. We argue this is attributable, in part, to a need for a broader view of what mathematics is, including cultural practices that are…

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in…

Background: Previous research found that pre-teenage ability to derive arbitrary "same," "opposite," "more," and "less" relations correlated with measured intelligence quotient (IQ) and that training this "derived relational responding" (DRR) skill produced substantial IQ rises. Aims: This study…

Link failures in wide area networks are common and cause significant data losses. Mesh-based protection schemes offer high capacity efficiency but they are slow, require complex signaling, and instable. Diversity coding is a proactive coding-based recovery technique which offers near-hitless (sub-ms) restoration with a competitive spare capacity…

Recent studies on a computationally hard visual optimization problem, the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), indicate that humans are capable of finding close to optimal solutions in near-linear time. The current study is a preliminary step in investigating human performance on another hard problem, the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem, in which…

The aim of this article is to present a scheme for coding and categorizing students' written explanations of mathematical problem-solving activities. The scheme was used successfully within a study project carried out to determine whether student problem-solving behaviour could be positively affected by writing explanatory strategies to…

The Hill cipher is the simplest example of a "block cipher," which takes a block of plaintext as input, and returns a block of ciphertext as output. Although it is insecure by modern standards, its simplicity means that it is well suited for the teaching of such concepts as encryption modes, and properties of cryptographic hash functions. Although…