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The EduJudge project phase concerning the development and assessment of the Pilot Experience is already successfully over
6/07/2010
The different courses involved in the development of the EduJudge Pilot Experience have just reached the ending point. All the pilot experiences have been held in the facilities of the EduJudge partners institutions. Every teacher has taken charge of preparing the content presented in courses, improving the teaching process by the use of the EduJudge system within the classroom and encouraging students to do their best during the learning period.
In conjunction with the above, CEDETEL has played the role of administrator of the Moodle site along this phase and thus, its main function can be summarised like keeping under control the platform, reporting bugs and problems to the suitable partners and gathering information from the system to carry out the assessment of these experiences.
As to the analysis of results, it is important to mention that a total of 179 students from different nationalities, mainly from the EduJudge partners countries, have taken part in the pilot experiences of such an innovative system. Finally, it is of utmost importance to remark that most of students have positively evaluated both the three components of the EduJudge system and the labor of the respective teachers. This way, students think that the EduJudge problems are suitable to the aims of the courses, clear and well structured with an appealing context.
Last but not least and to sum up, after the important deal of assessment on-line surveys received, both from learners and teachers, it is notable to say that the pilot experience of the EduJudge system may be considered as a success and once the exploitation period starts, all the information, which has been gathered in this phase, will be really valuable.
The EduJudge Partnership attended the Closing Meeting in Stockholm
3/06/2010
The third meeting among the partners of the EduJudge Project took place the 4th and the 5th of May in the facilities of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden). Representatives of the partners institutions reviewed the project progress and the current state in this event corresponding to the closing meeting.
Once, both the problems repository and the UVa On-line Judge have been integrated into the open-source e-learning platform Moodle, the EduJudge questions and the external evaluation through the judge can already be successfully supported within an activity in a Moodle course.
The general overview of the meeting was positive and all the points included into the scheduling were treated in detail. In the first place, a review of the current state of the project was undertaken in which the open tasks were discussed in depth, as well as the framework of the project as a whole. Secondly, the steps to achieve well-structured technical and financial reports were exposed to the consortium.
On the other hand, the main pillar of the meeting was the exploitation and sustainability of the EduJudge system. This way, rough ideas, which were previously presented by partners within the different forms, were reviewed in terms of setting up the way to proceed for the development of the IPR Agreement. Furthermore, concerns related to the reach of target users of the EduJudge system were assessed during this first session. Finally, the latest issue of the agenda was the appreciation of the good work of the EduJudge partners in regard with the dissemination activities.
During the second day of the meeting, the agenda was based on the review of the pilot experiences and the assessment of results achieved so far. Along the presentation of such important points the coordinator used data from the Moodle site, which has supported the experiences of the partners. These trials have consisted of developing tests within courses that belong to the official academic program of each partner institution. As closure of the meeting, some suggestions and future improvements were discussed in the framework of the EduJudge system.
EduJudge Project partners during the meeting
EduJudge Pilot Experiences from Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Lithuania
23/03/2010
The EduJudge partners are nowadays undertaking the pilot experiences of the EduJudge system in the facilities namely Vilnius Lyceum in Lithuania. With a number of learners big enough to test the system, this course is of upmost importance within the academic program seeing that it belongs to the 11th grade of the 12 existing educational grades.
Students are working on small projects that last one or two weeks and are focused on algorithmic. On the other hand, the main aim of this course is to train learners in order to participate in the Olympiads in Informatics. This subject is optional and most of students show a high degree of motivation during the 3 hours per week in which they devote to working and testing the EduJudge system.
Regarding the level education, needless to say that this level depends on the pupil in question but there is the chance of choosing the most suitable programming language for every assignment among Pascal, C and C++.
User interface and groups of learners from Lithuania testing the EduJudge system
This pilot experience has been extended until the celebration of the EduJudge Closing Meeting in Stockholm (Sweden) during which the EduJudge Consortium will discuss the results of this phase in conjunction with other respects related to the Project.
EduJudge Project Partners begin the pilot experiences by imparting courses in their institutions
14/01/2010
The EduJudge pilot experiences belong to one of the most important phases within the EduJuge Project (Integrating On-line Judge into Effective E-learning) lifetime. The main aim of this phase is the assessment of the different results of the project and the demonstration of the benefits of using an e-learning competitive tool based on ICT within the classroom.
The methodology to undertake these pilot experiences consists of developing several courses which are going to make use of the improved UVA On-line Judge that has been integrating into the e-learning platform Moodle together with the EduJudge type problems repository, whose problems at the same time are learning activities inside the QUESTOURnament module. The aforementioned courses belong to the official academic programs of the partner institutions and will be able, without a doubt, to test and validate the running of the EduJudge system in order to get a robust final system.
To support the development of the pilot experiences a Moodle site has been created to accommodate the courses aimed at testing the system. The on-line survey is one of the activities included in each course, which must be fulfilled by all the users and will permit: obtain personal data for the statistics; assess the On-line Judge functionality, the quality of the problems stored in the repository, the features of the repository, the operation of the QUESTOURnament module, and finally the EduJudge system as a whole.
Screenshot in which it is shown a QUESTOURnament challenge that contains an EduJudge type question
The scheduling to carry out the development of the pilot experiences is shown in the next table:
Partner/Institution |
Course |
University of Valladolid (UVA) |
Prácticas de Algoritmia para Ingeniería Informática (Algorithms) |
University of Porto (UP) |
Algoritmia e Programação (Engenharia Mecânica) |
Análise Estruturação de Informação e Sistematização de Processos (Engenharia e Gestão Industrial) |
|
Análise Estruturação de Informação e Sistematização de Processos (Engenharia Biomédica) |
|
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) |
Low Level Programming and Computer Architecture |
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (IMI) |
Ivadas i programavima Paskaliu (Vilniaus Licejus) |
Programavimas (JPM) |
EduJudge Project Partners have taken part in the CLI Symposium which has been held in conjunction with the ACM ICPC Final
19/05/2009
The 33rd ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), also known as the Battle of the Brains, has challenged remarkable students to solve real-world computer programming problems under a five-hour deadline.
Regional contests run from September through December, 2008, and the Word Final has taken place on April 2009 during the days 18-22 in Stockholm, Sweden. The 2009 World Finals activities have been hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, one of the EduJudge Project partners and the 2009 World Champion has been St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics.
On the other hand, the Competitive Learning Institute Symposium (CLIS) has been held in conjunction with the ACM Final in which the EduJudge Project Partners took active part. The University of Valladolid partners made a presentation about the EduJudge project; they discussed the current state of the project. The representatives of The University of Porto conducted a talk based on the operation of learning objects and other about the problems repository crimsonHex. Lastly, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (IMI) gave a speech about the importance of informatics contests and the competitive learning.
Finally, it is important to mention that the best contributions of this Symposium will be part of the book about competitive learning which is being developed in the framework of the EduJudge Project.
For further information about ACM-ICPC World Finals you can visit the ACM ICPC website or the KTH ACM ICPC 2009 website.
EduJudge Project Partners during their presentations in the CLI Symposium.
The partners of the EduJudge project met in CEDETEL the 2-3 of April
17/04/2009
The mid-term meeting of the EduJudge project took place in the facilities of CEDETEL, located in Boecillo Technological Park, the 2-3 of April.
Members of the University of Valladolid and the University of Porto, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in Lithuania and researchers of CEDETEL checked the progress and status of the Project.
Currently, prototypes of the different components of the system are available: a programming and mathematical problems repository, an improved and optimized UVA Online Judge, and the QUESTOURnament system used to develop courses in classroom. This last system is integrated into the Moodle e-learning platform and it has been adapted and extended not only to show questions which belong to external repositories, but also to provide evaluation of the different activities by external agents, as for example the UVA Online Judge.
Several technical aspects were dealt in the meeting, as the integration of the three mentioned components and the security of the communication between them, which were solved in a successful way.
During the second day, in the Telecommunications School of the University of Valladolid, the partners received a course for the use of the system during the pilot experiences which are taking place in the partner institutions from October 2009 until March 2010. These pilot experiences will consist in the provision of officially recognized courses in several universities, based on the EduJudge system. In the Lithuanian case, the courses will take place in Secondary Schools.
The EduJudge Project partners during the meeting.
KTH is hosting the ACM ICPC World Finals in Stockholm 18-22 April 2009
11/02/2009
The ACM ICPC World Finals will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, on 18-22 April. The contest of this year is the 33rd edition of ACM ICPC Word Finals, sponsored by IBM, and the EduJudge Project partner, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, will be the host of these world finals between 100 winner university teams, which have participated in regional contests in their countries.
As other years, at the same time as the competition, a symposium about competitive learning is taking place on 18-20 April. The partners of the EduJudge project are actively involved in these competitions and they will be present at the event and participate in the symposium, with the aim to promote the EduJudge system between the participants.
For further information about ACM-ICPC World Finals you can visit the ACM ICPC 2009 website.
The University of Porto is going to present crimsonHex at ICEIS09
11/02/2009
The International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS'09, will take place in Milan, Italy, in May. In this conference the University of Porto, partner of the EduJudge project, is going to present a Service Oriented Repository of Specialised Learning Objects called crimsonHex.
This repository is being developed during the EduJudge project and it is going to be integrated into other services (Moodle+QUESTOURnament and the UVA Online Judge), to form the EduJudge system.
Below an abstract of the paper the University of Porto will present during this event is shown:
The corner stone of the interoperability of eLearning systems is the standard definition of learning objects. Nevertheless, for some domains this standard is insufficient to fully describe all the assets, especially when they are used as input for other eLearning services, as is the case of the repository of programming problems in the EduJudge project. This repository is fully compliant with the existing interoperability standards and supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains. We illustrate this feature with the definition of programming problems as learning objects and its validation by the repository. This repository is also prepared to store usage data on learning objects, provided by the client eLearning systems. This data is meant to be used to tailor the presentation order and adapt it to a particular learner profile.
The University of Valladolid participates in the 20th International Olympiad in Informatics
10/10/2008
The 20th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), one of the most important computer science competitions, took place in Egypt last August. High school students from different countries participated in this Olympiad. At the same time, the IOI Conference took place on the 18th of August, in which Dr. Miguel A. Revilla from the University of Valladolid participated, as invited speaker. Dr. Revilla presented his experience related to the UVA Online Judge as well as the EduJudge project, which will allow the effective use of the Judge in official courses.
The IOI conference concentrates on training and task types of these competitions, and many of the ideas and experiences are drawn from the national olympiads. This year, the range of topics was widen through the invitation of Dr. Revilla for presenting his experience. Given the interest showed by the audience, the committee indicated that this is intended to be the start of a trend.
More information about this conference is available at the IOI website.
Dr. Revilla during his presentation.
Second prize for the EduJudge poster presented at ICEE 2008
12/08/2008
Recently, the research group Infraestructuras, Tecnologías, Aplicaciones y Servicios de Telecomunicaciones (ITAST) of the University of Valladolid presented the work developed so far in the EduJudge (Integrating On-line Judge into Effective E-learning) project, in the frame of the International Conference on Engineering Education (ICEE) 2008, held in Pécs and Budapest (Hungary) from 27th until 31st of July 2008. Submitted to the e-learning category, one of the many topics discussed in the frame of this international conference, the poster describing the work of the research group ITAST in the Edujudge project awoke a great interest among the participants in the conference, who awarded it the second prize of the posters submitted to every and each category.
Dr. Mª Ángeles Pérez of the University of Valladolid together with Professor Dr. József Mecsi, Conference Chair and Dean of the Pollack Mihály Faculty of Engineering, University of Pécs, during the awards ceremony.
The 20th International Olympiad in Informatics will take place in Egypt, on 16-23 August 2008
16/07/2008
The 20th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) will take place in Egypt, at Mubarak City of Education, on 16-23 August 2008. This Olympiad is one of the most recognized computer science competitions in the world, which brings together talented high school students from different countries.
The competition tasks are based on algorithms although the participants have to show other different IT skills. Students compete on an individual basis, with up to four students competing from each participating country (with around 81 countries in 2004). The students compete individually and try to maximize their score by solving a set of informatics problems during two competition days. The problems are algorithmic programming problems to be solved on a personal computer. Cultural and recreational events are organized on the remaining days of the competition.
EduJudge's representatives in this event will be Miguel Revilla from the University of Valladolid (Spain), invited speaker to the IOI Conference, and Valentina Dagiene, from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (Lithuania), member of the IOI International Committee.
More information is available at the IOI 2008 website (http://www.ioi2008.org/) and at the IOI website (http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml)
ACM-ICPC World Finals bring best young programmers together on 6-10 April
3/04/2008
The ACM - International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals are taking place in Alberta, Canada, 6-10 April. These World Finals, sponsored by IBM, are hosted by the University of Alberta that is celebrating its 100th anniversary. From 6,700 teams representing 1,821 universities in 83 countries competing at 213 sites from September to December 2007 world-wide, one hundred teams are advancing to these World Finals.
Matching with the Finals, a Competitive Learning Institute Symposium is taking place in which the EduJudge project is going to be presented. Different partners of the EduJudge project are attending these Finals and participating in the symposium.
As each year, the Finals promises to be an exciting meeting point of the best young programmers of the world!
Click here for further information about ACM-ICPC World Finals.
