Level Of Programming Skills Research Articles

TreatEEM—A Software Tool for the Interpretation of Fluorescence Excitation-Emission Matrices (EEMs) of Dissolved Organic Matter in Natural Waters

Fluorescence excitation-emission matrices (EEMs) are a useful tool in aquatic sciences for monitoring and studying the biogeochemistry of organic matter in natural waters and engineered systems. Yet, the interpretation of the wealth of information available in EEMs requires the use of appropriate software. Existing software tools for the analysis of EEMs, offered by instrument producers, have limited treatment capabilities, while other freely available tools are based on the MATLAB or R programming languages, which require a certain level of programming skills and a pre-installation of MATLAB or R. Here, we present TreatEEM, the first non-commercial, stand-alone Windows-based software tool that provides comprehensive treatment of EEMs. Its greatest advantage is its user-friendly and interactive graphical user interface, providing a convivial and responsive graphical feedback on any action performed on either a single spectrum (recorded at one excitation wavelength) or EEM. The capabilities of TreatEEM, including (a) basic EEM treatment, such as simple inner filter correction, scatter removal, blank subtraction, Raman normalisation, smoothing, drift alignment etc., (b) extraction of useful parameters for DOM characterisation (Coble peaks and fluorescence indices) and (c) preparation of data for PARAFAC analysis plus presentation/manipulation of obtained PARAFAC components, are described in detail, along with a basic theoretical background on these most commonly used treatment steps of EEMs.

Introducing programming to ocean mapping students

The next generation of ocean mappers need to master programming skills to meet increasingly higher expectations for timely ping-to-public data workflows. As such, the e-learning Python for Ocean Mapping (ePOM) project was established at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/NOAA-UNH Joint Hydrographic Center (University of New Hampshire). The project aims to support new ocean mapping students and professionals in reaching a minimum level of programming skills. These skills are then expanded with further powerful capabilities by leveraging the open-source Python scientific stack and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Office of Coast Survey’s Pydro distribution. To the best of our knowledge, the ePOM project represents the first attempt at creating a set of comprehensive open-source courses providing students with the required initial coding skills for a career in the ocean mapping field.

Development of an Onboard Robotic Platform for Embedded Programming Education

Robotics has been used as an attractive tool in diverse educational fields. A variety of robotic platforms have contributed to teaching practical embedded programming to engineering students at universities. However, most platforms only support content with a low level of programming skills and are unlikely to support a high level of embedded programming. This low association negatively affects students, such as incomprehension, decreased participation, dissatisfaction with course quality, etc. Therefore, this paper proposed a new robotic platform with relevant curricula to improve their effectiveness. The developed platform provided practical content used in mechatronics classes and the capability to operate a robot with a high level of embedded programming. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed platform, participants (undergraduates) examined course evaluations for educational programs based on the developed platform compared with the previous year’s class evaluation. The results showed that the proposed platform positively affects students’ intellectual ability (performance) and satisfaction in programming education.

KGCN: a graph-based deep learning framework for chemical structures

Deep learning is developing as an important technology to perform various tasks in cheminformatics. In particular, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) have been reported to perform well in many types of prediction tasks related to molecules. Although GCN exhibits considerable potential in various applications, appropriate utilization of this resource for obtaining reasonable and reliable prediction results requires thorough understanding of GCN and programming. To leverage the power of GCN to benefit various users from chemists to cheminformaticians, an open-source GCN tool, kGCN, is introduced. To support the users with various levels of programming skills, kGCN includes three interfaces: a graphical user interface (GUI) employing KNIME for users with limited programming skills such as chemists, as well as command-line and Python library interfaces for users with advanced programming skills such as cheminformaticians. To support the three steps required for building a prediction model, i.e., pre-processing, model tuning, and interpretation of results, kGCN includes functions of typical pre-processing, Bayesian optimization for automatic model tuning, and visualization of the atomic contribution to prediction for interpretation of results. kGCN supports three types of approaches, single-task, multi-task, and multi-modal predictions. The prediction of compound-protein interaction for four matrixmetalloproteases, MMP-3, -9, -12 and -13, in the inhibition assays is performed as a representative case study using kGCN. Additionally, kGCN provides the visualization of atomic contributions to the prediction. Such visualization is useful for the validation of the prediction models and the design of molecules based on the prediction model, realizing “explainable AI” for understanding the factors affecting AI prediction. kGCN is available at https://github.com/clinfo.

Towards Enhancing Programming Self-Efficacy Perceptions among Undergraduate Information Systems Students

Aim/Purpose: Currently, Information Systems (IS) departments in business schools are moving towards integrating learning to program or code in their undergraduate core courses. Many factors affecting IS student success in learning to program have been identified, but there is still a dearth of knowledge about student perceptions on their own competence. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that may affect the success of IS students in learning to program. Background: Students’ perceptions about the value and difficulties to learn programming can affect their skills acquisition. IS educators need to understand the student perception related to difficulties of learning to program in order to offer more effective support during their teaching process and interactions with students. To address this need, this study examines two critical elements to improve teaching IS programming courses: (a) Programming Self-Efficacy—students’ beliefs on their own programming competence, combined with (b) levels of programming skills which IS students initially thought to learn for their future profession. Methodology: This study uses quantitative data drawn from undergraduate students in a Computer Information Systems classes at Colorado State University in U.S.A. and supported by qualitative data. Contribution: Quantitative data measures the correlation between students’ programming self-efficacy, their perceived value of programming, their own practice time, and the frequency of teaching assistant (TA) consultations. The qualitative data was utilized to understand students’ thoughts of the programming skills they need in their future profession that may influence their programming self-efficacy during the learning process. The importance of this study lies in the potential that the findings of this study are critical to investigate the most influential factors that are likely to be a vehicle through which educators can either improve self-efficacy of their students and/or understand it more fully. Furthermore, these findings may influence pedagogical practices for teaching programming languages in higher education contexts more successfully. For instance, applying a contextual learning approach may assist in identifying the most effective approach to teach programming courses, and in turn, will lead to increased learning outcomes as encountered and narrated by IS students. Findings: The correlation analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between IS students’ programming self-efficacy and their perceived value of learning programming. However, the practice time and frequency of TA consultations had no significant relationship with programming self-efficacy. In addition, the qualitative data revealed a clear placement of IS students’ vision of their future coding level into five categorical programming skills: novice, communicator, end-user, and professional, with a new category of “competent” emerging. Recommendations for Practitioners: The study suggests that IS Educators need to embed interventions for increasing IS students’ perceived value of learning programming and practice time. It is also very effective to associate the class activities with real life projects. Furthermore, we suggest to educators to apply the contextual learning approach that would support higher levels of value for programming and programming self-efficacy among IS students. Also, coordination between educators and employers can aid in developing effective programming classes, improving IS students’ job marketability. Recommendation for Researchers: Investigating other factors that potentially contribute to IS students’ programming self-efficacy, such as previous computer programming and math exposure, motivation, and economic status. Impact on Society: Realizing the importance of the programming self-efficacy could help IS educators to teach effective and efficient programming courses that ultimately result in students learning programming with high acquisition and less distress. Highlighting the importance of linking what the market needs with the course content would increase students’ programming self-efficacy and their chances of obtaining jobs. Future Research: An interactive programming tool is a suggested supplement for IS educators to increase student enthusiasm about practice time that would support students work on their own and enjoy the class, and educators would be capable to accurately track and assess students’ participations.

Programming Skills and the Relation in Fostering Students’ Higher Order Thinking

Programming skills (PS) refer to coding and debugging that are required for those who write a program in any programming language. Coding can be described as the implementation aspect of programming, whereas debugging can broadly be defined as fixing any incorrect code that is found after running the programming test. Higher-order thinking skills (HOTs) refer to the top three levels of Bloom’s taxonomy which are Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. This study aims to determine the relationship between PS and HOTs among secondary students. Many studies indicate that students who attend programming courses for first time have low levels of performance in PS. Coding and debugging skills reflect higher-order thinking levels. Therefore, an objective of this study was to investigate the effect of coding and debugging skills on their HOTs. The benefits of having PS among learners are that they are able to achieve HOTs. Indeed, these relationships may be explained by programmers need to apply all these HOTs throughout the three phases of the programming process. Students who have low levels of PS are able to achieve the analysis level, while students who have moderate levels of PS able to achieve the synthesis level, and finally, students with high levels of PS are able to achieve the evaluation level.

GP-selector: a generic participant selection framework for mobile crowdsourcing systems

Participant selection is a common and crucial function for mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) systems or platforms. This paper introduces a generic framework, named GP-Selector, to handle the participant selection from MCS task creation time to runtime. Compared to existing approaches, ours has the following two unique features. 1) In the task creation time, it assists task creators with diverse levels of programming skills to define basic requirements of participant selection. 2) In the runtime, it adopts a two-phase selection process to select participants who not only meet the basic requirements but also are willing to accept the task. Specifically, we utilize the state-of-the-art techniques including ontology modeling, end-user programming and multi-classifier fusion to implement GP-Selector. We evaluate GP-Selector extensively in three aspects: the end-user task creation, the expressiveness of the core ontology model, and the willingness-based selection algorithm. The evaluation results demonstrate the usability and effectiveness.

Exploración de las posibilidades de la librería Three-js en proyectos de difusión del patrimonio cultural

<p>For whatever project related with the study and conservation of cultural heritage, the dissemination stage of tree-dimensional (3D) information must be a key part of the whole process. Most of the existing web-based platforms are using WebGL technology to disseminate 3D content through Web navigators, despite they are normally generic, with a low level of viewers ‘customization. Alternatively, users can make use of several libraries, most of them open source, which allow a complete adaptation to the specific project features, even though enough level of programming skills are necessary to use them. In the present paper we will describe the minimum requirements that any cultural heritage dissemination project should contain and its implementation using Three-js, one of the most versatile open source libraries for 3D visualization. In addition, we will show several examples of Three-js integration with other libraries that take advantage from HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language, version 5) to enhance the user's experience on a Web platform.</p>

Measuring the Level of Algorithmic Skills at the End of Secondary Education in Hungary

Students starting their tertiary studies in Informatics are found to have a low level of algorithmic skills and understanding of programming, which leads to the high number of drop out students and failed semesters during their studies. The students’ low level of programming skills contrasts with their excellent results in the school leaving exams. To find out the reasons for this we have launched the TAaAS project (Testing Algorithmic and Application Skills), which focuses on the students’ algorithmic skills and programming ability in traditional and non-traditional programming environments. Our analyses proved that school leaving exams are not able to measure these abilities of the students, and beyond that, are not able to distinguish between the different levels of the students. Students are accepted into the universities and start their studies based on the misleading results of the school leaving exams.

The Availability of Faculty Publication Databases from Library Web Pages

Faculty publication databases or author bibliographies offer libraries an opportunity to provide services to users. Initially, these databases remained initiatives of special libraries in the health-sciences fields. Librarians used the publication information derived from these databases to compile lists for annual reports. However, the advent of new technologies, especially the Web, prompted numerous libraries to develop faculty publication databases for their institutions. The author conducted a survey of various listservs to discover the history and development of these databases. The results illustrate the popularity of Web-based faculty publication databases. The motivation for their creation varied, but most respondents emphasized the desire to highlight the research activities of their institutions. In addition, the content of materials included in the databases and the definition of faculty also varied, depending on the type of library. Librarians reported a wide range of software employed in the development of these databases highlighting their creation by librarians with various levels of programming skills. Moreover, additional features included in these projects underscore the potential for librarians to provide added value from this service. Finally, while institutional repositories seemingly present similar content, publication databases differ in their focus on a citation format that offers a solution to items without copyright permission for full-text accessibility.

Computer Based Training

Computer Based Training (CBT) (or Computer Aided Learning (CAL) — see below for some useful definitions) has been slow to develop both in education and in commerce and industry, because of the level of programming skills required for the authoring of effective material and the resource costs involved in the production of materials which usually have a narrow application and no commercial viability. Increasingly, however, useful CBT authoring languages/systems are becoming available for a wide range of mainframe, mini and microcomputers. These include relatively inexpensive systems running on IBM PCs and even BBC microcomputers; and providing their limitations can be tolerated, they can make it possible for teachers and trainers to author their own courseware in an efficient and cost‐effective way.

The Implementation of an In‐Core Compiler

The present need in teaching institutions to convey to hundreds of students at least an elementary level of programming skills has led to the development of a number of fast compilers, usually designed to remain in core throughout the compilation and execution of a batch of student programs. Such compilers have usually been developed by institutions with considerable resources in terms of hardware and man‐power. It is the author's belief that the writing of a special purpose compiler is not necessarily a large job, measurable in man‐years of effort and hence beyond the reach of a small installation. In this paper, methods of design and programming that have made such a project feasible with a limited amount of programmer effort are described, together with the reasons for implementing the compiler in its present form. Some suggested extensions are listed, as are some statistics covering two years’ use of the system.