Frame-Based Editing: Easing the Transition from Blocks to Text-Based Programming

Block-based programming systems, such as Scratch or Alice, are the most popular environments for introducing young children to programming. However, mastery of text-based programming continues to be the educational goal for stu- dents who continue to program into their teenage years and beyond. Transitioning across the significant gap between the two editing styles presents a difficult challenge in school- level teaching of programming. We propose a new style of program manipulation to bridge the gap: frame-based edit- ing. Frame-based editing has the resistance to errors and approachability of block-based programming while retaining the flexibility and more conventional programming seman- tics of text-based programming languages. In this paper, we analyse the issues involved in the transition from blocks to text and argue that they can be overcome by using frame- based editing as an intermediate step. A design and imple- mentation of a frame-based editor is provided

Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants

Yellow elephants are slow. A major reason is that they consume their inputs entirely before responding to an elephant rider's orders. Some clever riders have trained their yellow elephants to only consume parts of the inputs before responding. However, the teaching time to make an elephant do that is high. So high that the teaching lessons often do not pay off. We take a different approach. We make elephants aggressive; only this will make them very fast. We propose HAIL (Hadoop Aggressive Indexing Library), an enhancement of HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce that dramatically improves runtimes of several classes of MapReduce jobs. HAIL changes the upload pipeline of HDFS in order to create different clustered indexes on each data block replica. An interesting feature of HAIL is that we typically create a win-win situation: we improve both data upload to HDFS and the runtime of the actual Hadoop MapReduce job. In terms of data upload, HAIL improves over HDFS by up to 60% with the default replication factor of three. In terms of query execution, we demonstrate that HAIL runs up to 68x faster than Hadoop. In our experiments, we use six clusters including physical and EC2 clusters of up to 100 nodes. A series of scalability experiments also demonstrates the superiority of HAIL.Comment: VLDB201

Разработка интеллектуальной системы семантического разбора текста с последующим преобразованием в блок-схему для развития логического мышления у детей младшей школы

This article describes the problem of the lack of special software for teaching primary school children think logically. In addition, it propose a new way to improve children's thinking level through an automated program that allows to convert normal text into a block diagram. As a result, system development has begun based on the development concept. This system is already able to generate a block diagram of the entered text

Quick QI: A Two-Week Self-Directed Quality Improvement Project

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education endorses a formal longitudinal quality improvement (QI) curriculum. Our internal medicine program’s tandem-block schedule, in which residents rotate through two-week blocks, creates a unique challenge in teaching QI to internal medicine residents. To overcome the educational barriers of a two-week rotation, we created a short, self-directed QI curriculum to introduce basic QI theory and methods. Through this curriculum, we aim to expose residents to existing QI activities, showcase institutional QI endeavors, foster resident-driven QI projects, and develop teaching experience in the realm of QI and patient safety. The curriculum involves residents in institutional QI endeavors, exposes them to institutional safety priorities and the error reporting systems, fosters development of a QI project, improves resiliency through reflection, and enhances aptitude for teaching through leading QI conferences. Survey data has shown a significant improvement in QI-related knowledge and skills

Podcasting, pupils and pre-service-teachers

This Action Research conforms to Cohen's definition (2000) as "small scale intervention in the functioning of the real world and a close examination of the effects of such an intervention." It is a pilot study that uses a small, but representative group of students with a view to establishing generalisations about the wider applicability of the methods explored. (Burns, 2000, pp. 460-461) The authors examine the use of podcasting - a popular contemporary method of delivering audio content through computers and portable media players. Many rationales for their use in education can be advanced, for example Freedman (2006) lists sixteen reasons including the potential for students to access the podcasts at their own convenience. See also Maag (2006) and Kollar (2006). The study group included six undergraduate, pre-service science teachers who were completing a BSc (Honours) in Bioscience with Teaching. They had previously undertaken course assessments which incorporated presentations to peers and tutors. The pre-service science teachers had already completed block and serial school placements and were considered as being skilled in planning and delivering short presentations as part of their classroom practice. Their presentations had invariably been supported with well constructed and illustrated PowerPoint presentations. The Benchmark Standards for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (General Teaching Council for Scotland & Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2006) relate to classroom to whole school standards for ITE in Scotland. They make specific reference to the significance and the expectations for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT is viewed (paragraph 3.1) as a "Core professional interest" and student teachers should be "undertaking a range of approaches to teaching to facilitate the learning of pupils, including the appropriate use of information and communications technology". Also, ICT provides the potential "to contribute to a process of change". Boud (2000) was critical of assessment practices in higher education institutions and suggested "The purposes of assessment should be extended to include the preparation of students for sustainable assessment". Draper and Maguire (2006) explored the use of podcasts in campus based teaching with first year undergraduates in the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project. These considerations helped motivate the authors to explore podcasts as a means of promoting sustainable assessment with fourth year undergraduates and consider their potential within professional graduate courses. The research explored the following questions: - Did the process of preparing podcasts extend their professional learning? - Can pre-service teachers deliver a well planned, coherent and well organised presentation to demonstrate their understanding of principles of learning and teaching? - Can pre-service teachers prepare a podcast to describe their own action research findings? Pre-service science teachers found the process challenging and rewarding. Pre-service teachers prepared podcast presentations that described their own action research findings. Pre-service teachers delivered well planned, coherent and well organised presentations to demonstrate their understanding of principles of learning and teaching. The process of preparing podcasts extended their professional learning in a variety of ways - base level technical competence in managing the software; pedagogically in identifying and supporting a teaching and learning resource; and professionally in relation to the Benchmark Standards for ITE. The approach is transferable to further study with a larger group of PGDE pre-service teachers

Elective courses as content block of profile teaching of school education

Differential approach for teaching of schoolchildren at general educational teaching establishments of Ukraine is integral partof organization of qualitative school education. School teachers use different sets of instruments to solve this problem. Elective courses can be regarded as content block of profile teaching of school education. Their contents depend on the profi le, which the pupil chooses, while studying at profi le school. The contents of elective courses is examining on the example of such school subject as chemistry. The article is dedicated to this problem

A study to determine the role of one mental health integrator as she functioned on the instructional staff responsible for the teaching of fundamentals of nursing, Block III, in "X" University School of Nursing.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

ALANZ handbook

Co-edited Handbook for participants at December ALANZ Symposiu