Starting from scratch: experimenting with computer science in Flemish secondary education

In the Flemish secondary education curriculum, as in many countries and regions, computer science currently only gets an extremely limited coverage. Recently, in Flanders (and elsewhere), it has been proposed to change this, and try-outs are undertaken, both in and outside of schools. In this paper, we discuss some of those efforts, and in particular take a closer look at the preliminary results of one experiment involving different approaches to programming in grade 8. These experiments indicate that many students from secondary schools would welcome a more extensive treatment of computer science. Planning and implementing such a treatment, however, raises a number of issues, from which in this paper, we formulate a handful as calls for action for the computer science education research community

Informaticawetenschappen in het leerplichtonderwijs

Dit standpunt bepleit en beargumenteert de noodzaak om elke jongere een opleiding informaticawetenschappen aan te bieden die toelaat om ’informaticavaardig’ te worden. Informaticavaardigheid gaat verder dan louter ‘digitale geletterdheid’, en houdt ook in dat de jongere in staat moet zijn ‘computationeel’ te denken. Computers zijn onmisbaar geworden, zowel in het professionele leven als in de privésfeer. Om de technologische evolutie te kunnen volgen is het van groot belang dat alle jongeren niet alleen de bestaande technologie leren gebruiken, maar ook de onderliggende werking leren begrijpen. Om de technologische evolutie te kunnen sturen, is het nodig dat voldoende jongeren in staat en gemotiveerd zijn om nieuwe technologie te creëren. Om deze doelstellingen te realiseren, dient het onderwijs van de informatica in het leerplichtonderwijs grondig hervormd te worden. In het basis- en secundair onderwijs dient een basisopleiding informaticawetenschappen opgenomen te worden, waarop in specifieke STEM richtingen voortgebouwd wordt. Een nieuw leerprogramma, goed opgeleide leraars en een goede informatica-infrastructuur zijn broodnodig. Ons leerplichtonderwijs is de belangrijkste actor om volgende generaties voor te bereiden op het leven, zowel professioneel als privé. De digitalisering van onze maatschappij kan haar voordelen alleen waarmaken als het onderwijs aangepast is aan deze digitale realiteit. Informatica- wetenschappen is een autonome wetenschap geworden met haar eigen manier van denken, en haar eigen basisbegrippen, te vergelijken met wiskunde, natuurkunde, en andere wetenschap- pen, die haar plaats in het onderwijs verdient. Het moet duidelijk zijn dat het hier niet gaat over het onderwijs van de traditionele vakken met de steun van informaticahulpmiddelen maar wel over de informaticawetenschappen zelf als vormend vak. Dit standpunt kwam tot stand binnen een werkgroep, opgericht door de KVAB en de Jonge Academie en samengesteld met leden uit diverse academische disciplines, onderwijsdeskundi- gen en actoren uit de bedrijfswereld

Current challenges in software solutions for mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics

This work was in part supported by the PRIME-XS project, grant agreement number 262067, funded by the European Union seventh Framework Programme; The Netherlands Proteomics Centre, embedded in The Netherlands Genomics Initiative; The Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre; and the Centre for Biomedical Genetics (to S.C., B.B. and A.J.R.H); by NIH grants NCRR RR001614 and RR019934 (to the UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility, director: A.L. Burlingame, P.B.); and by grants from the MRC, CR-UK, BBSRC and Barts and the London Charity (to P.C.

Molecular and Electrophysiological Characterization of a Novel Cation Channel of Trypanosoma cruzi

We report the identification, functional expression, purification, reconstitution and electrophysiological characterization of a novel cation channel (TcCat) from Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiologic agent of Chagas disease. This channel is potassium permeable and shows inward rectification in the presence of magnesium. Western blot analyses with specific antibodies indicated that the protein is expressed in the three main life cycle stages of the parasite. Surprisingly, the parasites have the unprecedented ability to rapidly change the localization of the channel when they are exposed to different environmental stresses. TcCat rapidly translocates to the tip of the flagellum when trypomastigotes are submitted to acidic pH, to the plasma membrane when epimastigotes are submitted to hyperosmotic stress, and to the cell surface when amastigotes are released to the extracellular medium. Pharmacological block of TcCat activity also resulted in alterations in the trypomastigotes ability to respond to hyperosmotic stress. We also demonstrate the feasibility of purifying and reconstituting a functional ion channel from T. cruzi after recombinant expression in bacteria. The peculiar characteristics of TcCat could be important for the development of specific inhibitors with therapeutic potential against trypanosomes

IT, ethics and education: Teaching the teachers (and their pupils)

At colleges and universities, computer ethics has established itself as an integral part of computer science and information technology programmes, at least in principle. However, many of the issues involved are not only relevant to IT professionals, but also to IT users or even any citizens of our IT intensive society. It is therefore important that ethical issues in IT receive proper attention in secondary school, both in IT classes and other contexts. For this to be possible, firstly, educational policy and plans have to be adjusted. Secondly, teachers must get a thorough introduction to computer ethics, and learn appropriate teaching methods. Finally, teaching materials have to be developed and distributed. We describe ongoing efforts to help bring all this about.status: publishe

To Parse or Not To Parse

Writing meta interpreters is a well-known technique to enhance the expressive power of logic programs. However, the resulting interpretation overhead considerably slows down program execution. A natural approach to solving this efficiency problem consists in specialising the interpreter with respect to a given object program, thus removing the overhead. Fully achieving the latter goal however, turns out to be a non trivial task. Satisfying results could often only be obtained at the cost of using not fully automatic and/or ad hoc techniques. In this paper, we reconsider the problem of specialising the vanilla meta interpreter through fully automatic and completely general methods. In particular, we study how the homeomorphic embedding relation guides specialisation of the interpreter. We focus on the so-called parsing problem, i.e. in essence removing metainterpretation overhead, in particular parsing conjunctive goals, and demonstrate that further control refinements are..

Country report: Belgium (Flanders)

In this contribution, we briefly present the current (defective) status of computer science in Flemish (primary and) secondary education and teacher training. We also discuss some recent initiatives which may offer some hope for improvement in the not too distant future.status: publishe

Media literacy as a context for "ICT ethics" (secondary) education? (some preliminary thoughts)

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Ensuring Global Termination of Partial Deduction while Allowing Flexible Polyvariance

The control of polyvariance is a key issue in partial deduction of logic programs. Certainly, only finitely many specialised versions of any procedure should be generated, while, on the other hand, overly severe limitations should not be imposed. In this paper, well-founded orderings serve as a starting point for tackling this so-called "global termination" problem. Polyvariance is determined by the set of distinct "partially deduced" atoms generated during partial deduction. Avoiding ad-hoc techniques, we formulate a quite general framework where this set is represented as a tree structure. Associating weights with nodes, we define a well-founded order among such structures, thus obtaining a foundation for certified global termination of partial deduction. We include an algorithm template, concrete instances of which can be used in actual implementations, prove termination and correctness, and report on the results of some experiments. Finally, we conjecture that the proposed framewor..