Educational technology is nowadays utilized frequently in programming courses. Still, the final exams are mostly done using "traditional" pen-and-paper approach. In this paper, we present the adaptation of automatically assessed electronic exams in two programming courses. The first course was an introductory programming course taught using Java and the second one an advanced course about object-oriented programming. The usage of electronic exams offers several potential benefits for students, including, for example, the possibility to compile, test and debug the program code. To study the adaptation of electronic exams, we observed two instances of the courses mentioned above. Individual scores, submission counts and time spent on each task were analyzed. This data enabled us to classify the exercises in exams according to their difficulty level. This information can be used to further design exams to measure students' knowledge and skills adequately. The analyzed data and the student feedback seem to confirm that electronic exams are an excellent tool for evaluating students in programming courses, and can be recommended to other educators as well.

No abstract

No abstract

Executive SummaryProgram visualization is one of the various methods developed over the years to aid novices with their difficulties in learning to program. It consists of different graphical -often animated -and textual objects, visualizing the execution of programs. The aim of program visualization is to enhance students' understanding of different areas of program execution. Typical program visualization techniques include code highlighting, visualization of the call stack, and presenting information on variables. Despite the large number of studies performed on program visualization, little is known about the effects of such systems on learning.We have developed a program visualization tool called ViLLE, with the main objective of offering an environment for students to study the execution of example programs -whether written by students themselves or prepared by the teacher -and explore the changes in the program state data structures. A key feature of ViLLE is language independency, including parallel execution of a program in two different languages and the ability to define new languages. ViLLE also provides role information of program variables and supports the design and use of interactive pop-up questions.In this paper, we report and discuss the results of a study on the effectiveness of ViLLE. The research was conducted on university students in their first programming course. Students participated in a two hour session in a computer class, where they were randomly divided into two groups. T he control group used only traditional textual material during the session, whereas for the treatment group, the same material was extended with interactive examples using ViLLE. With this research setting, we tried to answer two research questions: " Does ViLLE help students in learning to program?", and "Is there any difference in learning when previous programming experience is taken into account?" We found some support for a positive answer to the first question, although we couldn't fully reject the null hypothesis. For the second question, we obtained solid evidence that ViLLE enhances the learning of students with no prior programming experience substantially, so that the statistical differences between the novices and the more experienced learners disappeared as a result of a single training session. This indicates that program visualization indeed improves novice students' learning.

In this study we investigate the effects of long-term technology enhanced learning (TEL) in mathematics learning performance and fluency, and how technology enhanced learning can be integrated into regular curriculum. The study was conducted in five second grade classes. Two of the classes formed a treatment group and the remaining three formed a control group. The treatment group used TEL in one mathematics lesson per week for 18 to 24 months. Other lessons were not changed. The difference in learning performance between the groups tested using a post-test; for that, we used a mathematics performance test and a mathematics fluency test. The results showed that the treatment group using TEL got statistically significantly higher learning performance results compared to the control group. The difference in arithmetic fluency was not statistically significant even though there was a small difference in favor of the treatment group. However, the difference in errors made in the fluency test was statistically significant in favor of the treatment group.