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• Gamification in Higher Education

  87-106

  Kinga Kovácsné Pusztai

  Views:

  473

  The way of thinking and the way of life of the today's children and teenagers have changed radically. Some of the well-established pedagogical methods that were used for decades have become obsolete. Therefore, we need to look for a new method to approach Generations Z and Alpha. Gamification, which has been known since 2010 and means the use of game elements in other areas of life, offers an opportunity to do so.
  In addition to a brief description of gamification, my article shows some possibilities for using it at the university. Furthermore, I investigate the impact of gamification on the student in "Algorithms and Data Structures" university course.

  Subject Classification: 97P30

• Developing a method to determine teachers’ and pupils’ activities during a mathematics lesson

  25-43

  Maija Ahtee

  Erkki Pehkonen

  Anu Laine

  Liisa Näveri

  Markku S. Hannula

  Pirjo Tikkanen

  Views:

  39

  Third-graders from nineteen classrooms (N = 316) were asked to draw a picture on a mathematics lesson. Based on these drawings we have developed a data analysing method that allows us to find out how pupils present both their teacher's and their classmates' activities in their drawings. Two inventories were formed that contain, respectively, teachers' and pupils' activities during a mathematics lesson as seen in the pupils' drawings. The first inventory contains 14 separate items organized into six groups that contain teacher activities like asking questions and giving feedback on mathematics. Ten of the items are related to teaching and the rest contain items like keeping order in addition to the teacher's location in the classroom. Respectively, pupils' activities are organized into five groups that contain altogether 22 items. These contain the activities of a single pupil, and also pupil-teacher and pupil-pupil discussions on mathematics.

• Teaching polygons in the secondary school: a four country comparative study

  29-65

  Éva Szeredi

  Judit Török

  Views:

  45

  This study presents the analysis of four sequences of videotaped lessons on polygons in lower secondary schools (grades 7 and 8) taught by four different teachers in four different countries (Belgium, Flanders, England, Hungary and Spain). Our study is a part of the METE project (Mathematics Educational Traditions in Europe). The aims and methodology of the project are described briefly in the introduction. In the next section of this paper we describe various perspectives on teaching and learning polygons which were derived from the literature, concerning the objectives, conceptual aspects and didactic tools of the topic. The next two sections introduce the main outcomes of our study, a quantitative analysis of the collected data and a qualitative description linked to the perspectives on teaching polygons. We conclude by discussing some principal ideas related to the theoretical and educational significance of this research work.

• Programming Theorems and Their Applications

  213-241

  István Fekete

  Tibor Gregorics

  Kinga Kovácsné Pusztai

  Anna Veszprémi

  Views:

  123

  One of the effective methodological approaches in programming that supports the design and development of reliable software is analogy-based programming. Within this framework, the method of problem reduction plays a key role. Reducing a given problem to another one whose solving algorithm is already known can be made more efficient by the application of programming theorems. These represent proven, abstract solutions – in a general form – to some of the most common problems in programming. In this article, we present six fundamental programming theorems as well as pose five sample problems. In solving these problems, all six programming theorems will be applied. In the process of reduction, we will employ a concise specification language. Programming theorems and solutions to the problems will be given using the structogram form. However, we will use pseudocodes as descriptions of algorithms resembling their actual implementation in Python. A functional style solution to one of the problems will also be presented, which is to illustrate that for the implementation in Python, it is sufficient to give the specification of the problem for the design of the solution. The content of the article essentially corresponds to that of the introductory lectures of a course we offered to students enrolled in the Applied Mathematics specialization.

  Subject Classification: D40