Informatica

State of emergency affects many areas of our life, including education. Due to school closure during COVID-19 pandemic as a case of a long-term emergency, education has been moved into a remote mode. In order to determine the factors driving the acceptance of distance learning technologies and ensuring sustainable education, a model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology has been proposed and empirically validated with data collected from 550 in-service primary school teachers in Lithuania. Structural equation modelling technique with multi-group analysis was utilized to analyse the data. The results show that performance expectancy, social influence, technology anxiety, effort expectancy, work engagement, and trust are factors that significantly affect teachers’ behavioural intention to use distance learning technologies. The relationships in the model are moderated by pandemic anxiety and age of teachers. The results of this study provide important implications for education institutions, policy makers and designers: the predictors of intention to use distance learning technologies observed during the emergency period may serve as factors that should be strengthened in teachers’ professional development, and the applicability of the findings is expanded beyond the pandemic isolation period.

Computational thinking is an increasingly important focus in computer science or informatics curricula around the world, and ways of incorporating it into the school curricula are being sought. The Bebras contest on informatics, which originated 12 years ago and now involves around 50 countries, consists of short problem-solving tasks based on topics in informatics. Bebras tasks engender the development of computational thinking skills by incorporating abstraction, algorithmic thinking, decomposition, evaluation and generalization. Bebras tasks cover a range of informatics concepts including algorithms and data structures, programming, networking, databases and social and ethical issues. Having built up a substantial number of Bebras tasks over 12 years it is important to be able to categorize them so that they can be easily accessed by the Bebras community and teachers within schools. The categorization of tasks within Bebras is important as it ensures that tasks span a wide range of topics; there have been several categorization schemes suggested to date. In this paper we present a new two-dimensional categorization system that takes account of computational thinking skills as well as content knowledge. Examples are given from recent tasks that illustrate the role that Bebras can play in the development of computational thinking skills.

Tablet computers and other mobile devices are widely used in education and other life activities. However, touch screen keyboards are not adapted to languages using alphabets with more letters than the English alphabet has. In this paper, we analyze the existing keyboards on such devices for various languages, influence of keyboard usability on the number of typing errors, and propose keyboard design guidelines for non-English languages. As an example, the layout for the Lithuanian language keyboard (32 native letters and 3 foreign letters) has been presented here. The described solution is not strictly related to the peculiarities of the Lithuanian language alphabet (apart from the number of letters), therefore it is suitable for other languages using a similar number of letters.

The number of digital resources to be used and reused for learning (learning objects) is constantly increasing, therefore describing learning objects with metadata is important to enhance learning object search, retrieval, and usage. Learning objects can be considered not only as resources, providing learning content, but as methodological resources, including teachers' experiences, reflections, examples or instructions of usage of content objects, and descriptions of learning methods. However, existing standards and specifications for learning objects metadata are not intended for including methodological resources and learning method descriptions together with content objects. In this paper, we present the results of a study, carried among general school teachers, which present a view of teachers on methodological resources and their importance, and propose a new model of learning object metadata for the learning object repository to include methodological resources, descriptions of learning methods and their links with content objects.

Software localization is one of important tasks to insure a successful computer user experience. The paper discusses how localization of the software dialog text can be accelerated and how to raise the quality of software product localization. We also discuss the main features and common structure of localizable software resources, their formats and preparation for localization. As a result, we suggest applying a modified formalism of attribute grammars to describe localizable resources, taking the graphical user interface as a basic grammar structure, localizable strings and their parts as terminal symbols, and using the attributes to add important metainformation and context to the resources. The main principles of creation of such attribute grammars are presented.

The main scientific problems investigated in this paper deal with the problem of multiple criteria evaluation of the quality of the main components of e-learning systems, i.e., learning objects (LOs) and virtual learning environments (VLEs). The aim of the paper is to analyse the existing LO and VLE quality evaluation methods, and to create more comprehensive methods based on learning individualisation approach. LOs and VLEs quality evaluation criteria are further investigated as the optimisation parameters and several optimisation methods are explored to be applied. Application of the experts' additive utility function using evaluation criteria ratings and their weights is explored in more detail. These new elements make the given work distinct from all the other earlier works in the area.

Internationalization of compilers and localization of programming languages is not a usual phenomenon yet; however, due to a rapid progress of software and programming technologies it is inevitable. The new versions of wide used programming systems already allow using the identifiers written in the native language, and partially supports Unicode standard, but still have many internationalization deficiencies.

Localization is a complex process based on translation and adaptation of software features. Usually localization progress is identified with the number of translated resource strings. The paper investigates the dependency of number of translated strings to amount of human resources used. It is shown that the number of translated strings increases much slower at the end of the work than at beginning. The last strings are especially difficult to translate. Quantitative evaluation of dependency between number of strings in progress and human resources is presented.

An algorithm testing methodology used in the programming teaching process is presented. Turbo Pascal system is used. Due to systematic use of some features of this system a pseudo-direct execution of algorithms expressed by Pascal procedures and functions may be ensured. The need to use data read and write statements is excluded. This enables a novice learner to concentrate himself on the main actions of an algorithm.