Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://repository.ukim.mk/handle/20.500.12188/5

The Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering (FCSE) within UKIM is the largest and most prestigious faculty in the field of computer science and technologies in Macedonia, and among the largest faculties in that field in the region. The FCSE teaching staff consists of 50 professors and 30 associates. These include many “best in field” personnel, such as the most referenced scientists in Macedonia and the most influential professors in the ICT industry in the Republic of Macedonia.

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Author: search.filters.author.Jancheska, SofijaHas files: No

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    THE ART OF DESIGNING AN INFORMATICS COURSE: HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT LEARNING SPACE FOR STUDENTS?
    (IATED, 2023-03)
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    Jancheska, Sofija
    Designing an informatics course has become a great challenge. The rapid technological developments coupled with today’s abundance of online learning materials have made it tricky for educators to design effective class curriculums. Our paper will provide educators with the winning formula for students’ perfect learning experience. We aim to inspire educators to leverage modern tools to create engaging and fruitful classes. Our work is a general toolbox which will enable educators to tailor their classes to different areas within the field of informatics. We thus aim to answer the following questions: “How to prepare well for an informatics class?”, “How to conduct an informatics class successfully?” and “How to evaluate a properly conducted informatics lesson?”. Our paper will familiarize educators with the whole cycle of designing a successful informatics course. We will specifically target the microlevels of a course, a lesson. We will discuss different aspects of every lesson: suitable methods for organization and planning of a lesson, structural elements of a lesson, types of lessons, didactic goals, appropriate selection of teaching material, active methods for teaching and learning, manners for fostering interaction between students and teachers and among students themselves, approaches to fully engage students, lesson delivery models, individualized techniques to target the learning goals of each student, assessment and evaluation of students. We will also take into consideration teachers’ preparedness including their expertise of the material, and their didactical, technical and psychological readiness. The quality of an informatics course lies in the relationship between educators and their students. It is a complex dynamic between teachers’ goals, plans, means, methods and organization, and students’ expectations, abilities, and motivation. Our paper reaches an equilibrium point between all the building blocks of the teaching process of the educator and learning experience of the students. Our focus is put on the teacher and their teaching methods and tactics. We perceive the teachers as pilots leading a full airplane, a class of students. They have a palette of gadgets available, and they need to make a specific choice for the plane to conformably fly and to finally land on the exact coordinates of the intended location. In our case, the fancy gadgets are all traditional and modern learning tools available to the teacher and the intended location is the goal of the teacher for the class. How can educators use the tools to meet their didactic goals? When should they use them at what times? What specific tools should they select for special educational tasks? What does this choice depend on? Our paper will take a holistic view of all components of the process of teaching and learning informatics.
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    UNVEILING THE NEXT WAVE OF LEARNING: NAVIGATING CHATGPT'S IMPACTFUL APPLICATION IN EDUCATION
    (IATED, 2024-03)
    Jancheska, Sofija
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    ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI, has achieved an immense popularity due to its unique capabilities. Trained on a massive dataset encompassing both text and code, ChatGPT demonstrates a remarkable ability to generate code as well as creative text content. Optimized for conversations, the chatbot allows users to guide discussions and generate desired content with consecutive prompts and replies as context. Its accessibility to the general public contributed to ChatGPT becoming the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. ChatGPT possesses human-like conversational skills and a seemingly infinite knowledge. Not only it is proficient in generating answers across a multitude of subject domains, but it also excels in elaborating on responses and engaging in meaningful follow-up conversations. Leveraging its advanced natural language processing capabilities, this large language model finds applications in diverse fields, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, language translation, text summarization, question answering, personalized content generation, education, healthcare, entertainment, and customer support. The emergence of ChatGPT has inspired diverse reactions, ranging from positive to negative perspectives. Positive responses highlight its potential for advancing various fields of science and education, while negative feedback often emphasizes concerns like inaccuracies and vagueness in ChatGPT-generated content. Views on ChatGPT vary, with some seeing it as a sophisticated plagiarism tool, while others perceive it as a potential threat that could compromise artists' freedom of expression. This paper aims to explore the main advantages and disadvantages of integrating ChatGPT in education, focusing on its effective usage across diverse school subjects, encompassing natural sciences, social sciences, and formal sciences. Concrete examples will be provided to illustrate how ChatGPT can be applied in various subjects, highlighting its versatile nature. We explore the primary educational applications of ChatGPT, spanning from asking questions and acquiring information to conducting supplementary research and analyzing information sources. It is crucial to acknowledge that while ChatGPT is a valuable resource, it is not perfect, and students should not solely rely on it. Instead, we encourage students to use ChatGPT as an initial step in their research process and cross-check information from other, credible sources. Developing critical thinking about the information obtained through artificial intelligence, students need to be aware of its shortcomings and limitations. Consequently, teachers play a vital role in training students to use ChatGPT responsibly and conscientiously. Hence, we aim to unveil ways in which students and teachers can maximize the benefits of ChatGPT to achieve an exceptional learning experience.
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    UNLOCKING THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF KEY DOCUMENTS SHAPING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN EDUCATION
    (IATED, 2024-03)
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    Jancheska, Sofija
    With the boom of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the past few years, there has been a notable upswing in the generation of resources dedicated to this field. Prominent international and supranational entities and initiatives, including UNESCO, European Commission, European Parliament, OECD, EdTech, AI4K12 and International Society for Technology in Education, have produced a significant number of documents in the field. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of carefully selected documents within the field of AI, specifically focusing on its applications in education. The goal is to provide a nuanced exploration encompassing professional expertise, comprehensive guidelines, and practical recommendations to enhance our understanding of AI. Through this detailed study of documents, our objective is to offer valuable insights for the future potential of AI in education. Our paper emphasizes ethical considerations, best practices, and guidelines, useful to educators, policymakers, and stakeholders who seek to integrate AI technologies responsibly and effectively into educational settings. Our paper also aims to promote responsible and beneficial integration of AI in education, with the ultimate goal of enriching learning experiences for students. With our carefully selected documents, we address various aspects, including the promotion of gender equality and human rights, conducting privacy impact assessments, ensuring responsible use of AI in accordance with privacy regulations, and identifying the essential knowledge and skills that students should acquire in the realm of AI. We explore how to equip students with a foundational understanding of AI concepts, ethical considerations, and practical skills, positioning them as informed and responsible users of AI technologies in the future. The document selection spans topics related to integrating AI in education, encompassing challenges, opportunities, standards, data privacy and security considerations, as well as addressing biases and ethical concerns.
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    Breaking Down GeoGebra: Two Dimensions of the GeoGebra Software Application
    (IATED, 2023-07)
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    Jancheska, Sofija
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    GeoGebra is a professionally produced, freely available, interactive and dynamic open-source educational mathematics software designed for teaching and learning mathematics at all levels of education, from elementary school to universities. In many educational systems around the world, the GeoGebra program is integrated into textbooks and various projects. GeoGebra is designed to combine the properties of dynamic geometry software and a computer algebra system into a single, integrated and easy-to-use tool for teaching and learning mathematics. GeoGebra has the ability to bridge the gaps that exist between different mathematical disciplines, combining the content of the fields: geometry, algebra, statistics, analysis, and tabular and graphical displays in a simple, convenient package. GeoGebra is equally popular among students and among teachers. It attracts students with its dynamism and interactivity, but also because it provides visual and conceptual feedback. It has been found that it encourages students to learn mathematics, helps them analyze different problems and simulate physical phenomena through dynamic structures. It offers unlimited opportunities for experimentation to students, which leads to better mastering of the teaching content and to effective learning. GeoGebra can also be used beyond the classroom: students can use it at home, when doing homework, for practice, for repeating lessons already learned and for preparing for future lessons. The use of GeoGebra modernizes teaching and positively affects the creativity of students and their critical thinking, helps to facilitate the acquisition and improvement of 21st century skills, intensifies the application of active learning methods. Apart from being a computer tool, many authors consider GeoGebra as a conceptual (ideal), pedagogical, cognitive and transformational tool in teaching and learning mathematics. In practice, we distinguish two main dimensions regarding the application of GeoGebra. On one hand, GeoGebra can serve as a tool for demonstration and visualization of formal mathematical knowledge. GeoGebra actually represents a virtual experimental mathematical laboratory, a place where hypotheses can be set up and tested; to monitor and verify scientific facts; to illustrate tasks and problems, their variations and sets of solutions; to analyze the properties of different geometric objects; to discover geometric places of points that satisfy certain conditions, to find significant points of functions; to prove mathematical statements; to demonstrate various proofs of mathematical statements and the like. On the other hand, GeoGebra can serve as an authoring tool for creating interactive learning materials. With GeoGebra, multimedia contents such as animations, simulations and computer games can be created that will serve as didactic tools, in the function of getting to know, studying and visualizing terms, concepts, ideas, ties or phenomena, as well as complex processes that cannot be easily described and explained in word and text, especially those involving some degree of abstraction. In this paper concrete examples of practical demonstration of these two dimensions of using the GeoGebra software will be presented and explained in detail.
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    OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF DISTANCE LEARNING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN MACEDONIA: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE NEIGHBORING COUNTRIES?
    (IATED, 2022-03)
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    Jancheska, Sofija
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    The global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic required significant changes to the operations of educational institutions all across the world, as all classes were transitioned to remote instruction. Since these changes occurred abruptly, there was little time in creating strategies to effectively manage this transition. Unusual enrollment patterns and students’ grades during this period reflect these disruptions, not necessary the work of the individual students. It is important to also acknowledge that the educational systems in countries around the world were facing serious challenges even before the COVID-19 outbreak. These weaknesses became more evident during the pandemic which additionally contributed to weakening the quality of these educational systems. The existence of distance learning tools to some extent facilitated this abrupt transition from the traditional face-to-face teaching system to distance learning education during the pandemic, but not all countries in the world implemented the same exact set of distance learning tools and techniques within this short time span. In this paper, we aim to explore different tools and adaptation techniques for distance learning education implemented in developing countries with similar educational ecosystems. In particular, we are interested in distance learning frameworks adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic in four Balkan countries: Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. We would like to examine the structure of online education in these countries, the extent to which they differ and whether they have yielded different results in students’ success and educators’ satisfaction levels. By conducting this case study, we also aim to identify the determinants of online effective learning. We would like to determine what online learning techniques have had a less positive effect on students’ learning effectiveness. Detecting the weaknesses of the system by looking at the challenges faced by students would enable to create practical solutions in order to improve their learning experience. Not only we are going to explore these issues from students’ point of view, but we are also including the educators’ perspective as an important variable in our study. We aim to analyze the difficulties educators in these four Balkan countries have been facing since the pandemic and how they have coped with them so far. Educators, just as students, come from a variety of technical backgrounds. While some have been exposed to the beauty and benefit of digital learning techniques and have previously used them in their teaching, others have not had the opportunity to explore them to the same extent. This is just one of the many variables we are taking into account when exploring the success of the transition from traditional to online teaching environment. We truly believe that developing countries can learn through the examples of their neighboring countries, especially since they have a tendency to have similar ecosystems, infrastructures and resources. By comparing the tools and techniques implemented in the online educational spheres in Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, we aim to detect the issues during the transitional period of education in these countries and provide concrete suggestions to the existing frameworks. Our ultimate goal is to improve the overall experience of both students and educators in the educational system during this everlasting health crisis.