research-article

Students' performance on programming-related tasks in an informatics contest in Finland, Sweden and Lithuania

Authors:

Pär SöderhjelmAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education

Pages 153 - 158

https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591760

Published: 21 June 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

The ways in which informatics is covered in K-12 education vary among European countries. In Finland and Sweden, informatics is not included in the core curriculum, whereas, for example, in Lithuania, all students are exposed to some informatics concepts starting in the fifth grade. Bebras is an annually arranged international informatics contest for K-12 level, resulting in a large collection of data about contestants and their results. In this paper, we analyse contest data from the Finnish, Swedish and Lithuanian 2013 con- tests, focusing on students' performance on tasks related to algorithmic thinking. Our findings suggest that despite coming from different educational systems, students perform rather similarly on the tasks. The same tasks are difficult and the thinking behind picking an incorrect answer seems rather similar throughout the countries. The analysis also points out that there is a lack of easy questions -- this needs to be fixed in order to not risk scaring students away.

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Cited By

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Malmi LHellas AIhantola PIsomöttönen VJormanainen IKilamo TKnutas AKorhonen ALaakso MLópez-Pernas SPoranen TSalakoski TSuhonen J(2023)Computing Education Research in FinlandPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_16(335-372)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_16
Liao S(2022)SCRATCH to R: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy in Teaching CodingJournal of Statistics and Data Science Education10.1080/26939169.2022.209046731:1(45-56)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2022.2090467
Multisilta JTuomi P(2020)Teaching and Learning Computational Thinking and Coding SkillsEncyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_60(1656-1664)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_60
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Index Terms

Students' performance on programming-related tasks in an informatics contest in Finland, Sweden and Lithuania
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

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Published In

ITiCSE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education

June 2014

378 pages

ISBN:9781450328333

DOI:10.1145/2591708

Conference Chairs:
Åsa Cajander
Uppsala University, Sweden
,
Mats Daniels
Uppsala University, Sweden
,
Program Chairs:
Tony Clear
Auckland University of Technology, NZ
,
Arnold Pears
Uppsala University, Sweden

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 June 2014

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ITICSE '14

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Bilkent University
SIGCSE

ITICSE '14: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference 2014

June 21 - 25, 2014

Uppsala, Sweden

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ITiCSE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 164 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

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Malmi LHellas AIhantola PIsomöttönen VJormanainen IKilamo TKnutas AKorhonen ALaakso MLópez-Pernas SPoranen TSalakoski TSuhonen J(2023)Computing Education Research in FinlandPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_16(335-372)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_16
Liao S(2022)SCRATCH to R: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy in Teaching CodingJournal of Statistics and Data Science Education10.1080/26939169.2022.209046731:1(45-56)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2022.2090467
Multisilta JTuomi P(2020)Teaching and Learning Computational Thinking and Coding SkillsEncyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_60(1656-1664)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_60
Gomez MMoresi MBenotti LScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Text-based Programming in Elementary SchoolProceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3304221.3319734(402-408)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3304221.3319734
Wiebe ELondon JAksit OMott BBoyer KLester JHawthorne EPérez-Quiñones MHeckman SZhang J(2019)Development of a Lean Computational Thinking Abilities Assessment for Middle Grades StudentsProceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3287324.3287390(456-461)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3287324.3287390
Wu LLooi CMultisilta JHow MChoi HHsu TTuomi P(2019)Teacher’s Perceptions and Readiness to Teach Coding Skills: A Comparative Study Between Finland, Mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, and South KoreaThe Asia-Pacific Education Researcher10.1007/s40299-019-00485-xOnline publication date: 30-Sep-2019
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Multisilta JTuomi P(2019)Teaching and Learning Computational Thinking and Coding SkillsEncyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-60013-0_60-1(1-9)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2019
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Tuomi PMultisilta JSaarikoski PSuominen J(2018)Coding skills as a success factor for a societyEducation and Information Technologies10.1007/s10639-017-9611-423:1(419-434)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
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Lonati VMonga MMalchiodi DMorpurgo AMontero CJoy M(2017)How presentation affects the difficulty of computational thinking tasksProceedings of the 17th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3141880.3141900(60-69)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2017
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Araujo ASantos JAndrade WGuerrero DDagiene V(2017)Exploring computational thinking assessment in introductory programming courses2017 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2017.8190652(1-9)Online publication date: Oct-2017
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