Training IT professionals in higher education has experienced difficulties because it has become mass education due to industrial demands. This is the reason why new approaches must be found besides former methods and tools so that we can attract and hold the attention of digital natives in the long run. These new approaches must be capable of detecting students that fall behind with their studies, they must also be suitable for setting differential requirements to students according to their streams when they study topics of hard attainment, consequently differential development can be reached in the field of different subjects of Informatics. When digital natives enter higher education, they do not possess such skills and abilities that they could use for understanding and creating algorithms. Moreover, they lack comprehensive knowledge of word processing and spreadsheet usage, and only few of them are capable of programing. Thus students of Informatics have to face significant challenges, and so do their teachers who have three to five years to train IT professionals who are able to apply or teach Informatics at a high level.
The members of the research team are examining this complex issue from different aspects. They are trying to find different methods for solving the above mentioned problems, and they are going to test them in practice. On the grounds of their findings, they are going to refine their new methods and present their results on international conferences.
Main Research Areas
- Generating tasks that are suitable for individual learning and testing (The main drawback of studying foundation courses in Informatics is that the number of standard worksheets is rather low. An increase in their number would make preparing for tests and testing much easier. The main purpose of the research is to develop worksheet generators concerning each topic of the foundation courses and to create a worksheet bank. With the help of gamification the commitment of students could be increased. The analytical check of the test results and the development of a system suggesting students tasks and activities based on their test scores would result in differential development.)