LEARN-BY-DOING VIRTUALLY; A GAMIFIED AND METAVERSE DESIGN FOR GROUP PROJECTS AIMING AT ENHANCING CONSTRUCTIVIST AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Probably the most challenging part of delivering a course is to engage the students in the learning process; to capture their interest to the extent that they will want to contribute to the on-going delivery of the course. Academics, try to achieve this in every possible way. Among other practices, educators plan their courses to include a variety of activities, utilize Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), reward the students for their contribution, show interest and offer prompt and honest support and feedback, act their role or use other appropriate means to make learning fun

A Tool For Teaching Spline Methods In A Computer Graphics Course

The specialized mathematics knowledge covered in a computer graphics course is usually presented to students in an abstract way. Albeit, computer graphics is an application of this (abstract) mathematics, students may find it hard to link them together. In particular one of the most difficult topics to present in a pedagogical manner to junior students in a computer graphics course is spline methods (mathematical method for data smoothing) used for curve/surface modelling. This topic involves mainly the mathematics of parametric functions, piecewise functions, derivatives, matrices, and parametric/geometric continuities. Usually a student has a vague picture of the actual output of the application of this mathematics. Many educators have experienced that students may fully understand splines application, if and when they are assigned a software project to implement splines, and this understanding could still remain vague until the very last stages of the implementation. As an alternative, static pictures may be presented in class to provide an intuitive understanding of splines. This approach is, in effect, similar to viewing a picture in a textbook. A better alternative is for the educator to demonstrate real-time spline generation, since a picture is worth ten thousand words but a moving picture (animation) is worth ten thousand static ones. This paper presents an interactive software program which is used as a tool to introduce important concepts and algorithms of spline methods to computer science and computer engineering students. The software is specially developed for educational purposes, and generates spline curves

PROMOTING INTERACTIVITY AND CREATIVITY IN A SCIENCE COURSE

Young people entering the working force are nowadays required to compete not only on skills and education but also on creative thinking. This is because creativity and innovation are a must for businesses and nations which, today more than ever, are required to compete on the creative use of the scarce resources and the identification of new ones. Thus, promoting creative thinking among students, individually and collectively, is an educator’s challenge. This paper presents the efforts made to promote creative thinking in a Human Computer Interaction course and the students’ evaluation of these efforts

The Balancing Act Of Developing An Undergraduate Mis Program

This paper reports on the developmental process of an undergraduate program for Management Information Systems at the School of Business of University of Nicosia which is a private University in Cyprus. The paper examines how, beyond the challenges widely documented in the literature, the team in charge of curriculum development had to balance out requests by a Visiting Team of academics appointed by ECPU -a national quality assurance body supervising private Universities- with the insights and guidelines of an Advisory Body composed of volunteering representatives of major business organizations in Cyprus, whilst keeping under consideration financial restrictions as well as constraints imposed by the regulatory framework of the University. The developed curriculum addresses these issues and provides flexibility for future growth in accordance with ever evolving challenges of this field

CYPRUS UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES OF CHANGES IN EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

In March of 2020 as a measure for the control of the coronavirus spread there was a worldwide closure of schools at all levels of education. Students and educators needed to immediately respond to the challenge of continuing the education under the new circumstances. That involved migrating all education offerings to a fully virtual environment. The migration which took place amidst the academic year proved to be very challenging in a number of ways. This paper reports on an empirical study which was completed in Cyprus and involved university students. The study surveyed the technological, economic, and psychological challenges faced by students as a result of the pandemic

STUDENTS’ BELIEFS ABOUT CREATIVITY

Creativity; a nature or nurture matter? Do some individuals have it and some do not? Traditionally, individuals involved with arts have been considered to be more creative as art-related professions may require more creative thinking than some other professions. At the same time, those involved with the sciences, e.g. mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists, and others are to-date not seen as being very creative [Official Statistics, 2015]. To contradict this viewpoint, research showed that we can all develop our creative thinking skills and ideas and we all have the capability of being creative. In fact, creative thinking might be the key to success in any profession since a creative solution might lead to a new innovation. In particular, at times of need, such as the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, almost all individuals, irrespective of profession, had to exhibit creativity in dealing with extraordinary situations. It should therefore be interesting to see to what extent are these societal beliefs about “creative and non-creative individuals” affecting our potential for creative thinking. As research showed that creativity can be developed, researchers got interested in investigating the role of the educator. At the same time, it should be interesting to investigate the beliefs of students about creativity as these might potentially affect their efforts to expand their creative thinking. This had been the aim of the present study which showed that the students believe that creative thinking is very important for the well-being and success of humanity to solve its problems. Students also believe in their own ability for creative thinking and their potential to improve their creative skills. They perceive such improvement as being possible to achieve via the education stream and they appreciate the supportive role of the educational environment towards teaching for creativity. The authors would like to conduct further research in order to: (i) compare and contrast the beliefs of students to those of teachers regarding creative thinking and teaching for creativity and (ii) approach creative thinking from the context of different specialties and programs of study both for the students and the educators

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE; AN EDUCATIONAL CASE STUDY

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to a very broad category of applications which assist executive business users to improve their decision making and strategic planning by collecting, storing and analysing usually a large volume of historically collected data and providing access to powerful and dynamic query results. Business Intelligence Systems (BIS) are also sometimes referred to as Decision Support Systems due to the fact that they provide support to users and organisations concerning their decision making. Without any doubt, BI is extremely vital for all organisations in today’s competitive business environment where even the smallest detail could affect the future of an organization. In the Computer Science (CS) undergraduate university curriculum the topic of Business Intelligence may be touched upon very briefly in a course on Database Management and in the graduate CS curriculum it usually becomes part of a Knowledge Management course. In the undergraduate Management Information Systems (MIS) curriculum some additional mentioning is usually done in an Information Systems course. Such brief coverage of the topic, paired with the absence of simple and inexpensive educational tools that could easily demonstrate its practical implementation, are not enough to stress the magnitude of BI to students. Thus, addressing the need for an educational case and tool which can be used to demonstrate in a simple but realistic way the use of BI to students, we devised the case that is described in this paper