This study reported the effectiveness of a professional development course on artificial intelligence (Al) literacy for administrative staff in higher education. The course aims to support administrative staff to improve their efficiency and the quality of their work in the workplace. A number of 38 administrative staff from a university in Hong Kong took part in this three-month course which was divided into 10 face-to-face lessons (30 hours). Basic concepts, practical use of Al tools, and Al ethics were taught, and group project-based learning was implemented. Many groups built chatbots using their expert knowledge in their workplace deploying concepts and skills acquired in the course. Data collection included pre- and post-concept tests, evaluation surveys, and self-reported written reflections. The result of a paired t-test on a concept test of Al literacy confirmed an improvement in the participants' understanding of Al literacy after joining the course. The result of a project-based survey and an evaluation of the course indicated a positive perception of the design and the effectiveness of the course after they finished taking the course. An analysis of the reflective writing of the participants revealed that they benefited from the course, and they confirmed that the course could help them pursue further how to improve the efficiency and quality of their work in their workplace by deploying the concepts and skills acquired from the course.

This paper proposed a system interface based on a novel progressive code generation framework to produce verified programming codes using natural language for mathematics learning. With the latest advancement of large language models such as GPT-4, people can ask GPTs to generate programming code using natural language. However, the codes generated may not be directly executable or aligned with the user's desired goal or purpose. Furthermore, different people may express their goals and purpose in different ways. Hence, there are many possible ways to map natural languages and code. Many of the code evaluation frameworks such as pass-ratio@n, BLEU and CodeBLEU evaluate large language models (LLMs) code generation ability based on their actual execution results on the first prompt without giving feedback of the code execution error. With this in mind, a framework that allows code generated from any large language model to progressively improve was proposed. The idea is to re-prompt the LLMs with the error feedback to generate codes until the code is executable and achieve the user's desire goal or purpose with a predefined number of iterations. If a certain number of iterations has been reached and the code is still not executable or cannot achieve users' intended goals or desire, the prompt would be useful to include in the training dataset for fine-tuning for that large language model. In this study, the application of the proposed framework to enhance the accuracy of mathematical problem-solving problems was tested and reported. This framework may be useful to improve any LLM code generating ability continuously. Discussions were made.

This paper reports on a mixed-method pilot study that designed and evaluated an Attention-Engagement-Error-Reflection (AEER) approach to enhance primary school students’ artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and learning-to-learn skills. A total of 35 Grade six primary school students in Hong Kong were involved. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. Data collection included (1) pre-, post-, and delayed post-AI concepts tests, (2) pre- and post-questionnaires on learning-to-learn skills, and (3) six focus group interviews. The results demonstrated the positive impact of the proposed AEER approach on students’ AI conceptual understanding and learning-to-learn skills. Students’ motivation in the learning process was analyzed. Finally, limitations and future directions were discussed.

Successful learners are cultivated by good learning habits and essential skills. Among them, self-regulated learning (SRL) is proven to be an effective learning strategy and pedagogical approach to develop independent learning, enhance learning outcomes, improve learning motivation, and finally achieve lifelong success. In language education, Digital Storytelling (DST) has been an emerging strategy for teachers to guide their students to learn a language by expressing ideas and meanings. However, little research has been done to explore the effectiveness of such integration on students’ language learning. The present study designed and developed a self- regulated digital storytelling (SRDST) curriculum for teachers to teach and students to learn English writing. About 110 primary grade 4 students of 9-10 years old participated in this study. A SRDST scale with 13 items in forethought, performance, and reflection phases was developed and validated. The results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) from the primary students (N=70) on a pre-/post-test design yielded three factors that were similar to the three phases of SRL, namely, forethought, performance and reflection stages. The paired-samples t-test results indicated a significant increase in forethought, suggesting that the students realized certain preparation needs to be done before their study, and they also preferred autonomy on managing their own learning. Further, the data demonstrated a significant result in the performance phase where the students can seek for help when encountering difficulties, and determine to keep up with the overall learning progress and complete the tasks on time. The results also revealed that the students tended to reflect on whether there were better ways to improve their final projects. Finally, the research found that young learners preferred to set learning goals during the performance stage which is different from adult learners.

Parents are assumed as one of the key figures to foster programming learning among children after school. However, little effort has been directed to the examination of parents’ perceptions and their consequent emotional and behavioral outcomes regarding programming education to date. This study attempted to explore how parents’ intrinsic motivation and positive affect would positively influence the relationship between their perceptions of programming education and involvement for providing a better learning opportunity to children. We collected 695 questionnaires from parents who brought their children to a one-day coding fair where they could experience the fun of programming. Results from Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis indicated that parents’ programming perceptions is positively related to their intrinsic motivation and positive affect. Mediation results suggested that parents’ perceptions such as understanding, support, and expectation can trigger their intrinsic motivation for encouraging children in programming learning and enhance their positive affect toward learning programming themselves, which consequently lead to increased attempts of parental involvement for the better guidance in technology use for children. Implications of the study were discussed.

To promote computational thinking (CT) education in primary schools, in-service teachers need to attend CT teacher development programmes. One of the intended learning outcomes of the programme is to improve CT practices of teachers, which is one of the three key elements in the CT framework proposed by Brennan and Resnick. Assessing one's CT practices is challenging because there is no universally agreed-upon assessment method on CT practices in the existing literature. This study adopted the Evidence-centered Assessment Design (ECD) method to design test questions to evaluate teachers' development of CT practices. This study provided two Teacher Development Courses (TDCs) to enable teachers to teach CT through programming. TDC 1 focused on developing CT concepts, practices and perspectives of teachers, while TDC 2 put emphasis on pedagogies of teaching CT. 80 teachers participated in the two courses. The CT practices tests were administered before the courses, between the two courses and after the courses respectively. Results indicated that CT practices were improved progressively when the in-service teachers attended the two courses. It indicated that it is useful for teachers to experience programming practices in their initial learning as well as during their pedagogical development.

Technologies, when embedded in instruction can provide unique opportunities for interaction. In this paper, to exploring the influence of digital equipment on interaction quality in Technology-rich Classroom, 54 lectures were observed in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shenzhen, and 626 interaction processes were recorded. The main conclusions are the following: (1) Interaction frequency, interaction object and interaction content in technology-rich classroom has been definitely enriched by digital equipment. Interaction quality in technology-rich classroom is extremely good, with an average score of 2.33 (1-3 scores). (2) From the perspective of "ownership" relationship between digital equipment and student, technology-rich classrooms are classified into three types. "Group-own" classroom is more helpful than "Individual-own" classroom for interaction quality. (3) Interactive whiteboard do not necessarily achieve more performance than multimedia-projector. But, interactive whiteboard could play an important role on interaction quality when 1:1 Pad/Laptop involved in classrooms. (4) Digital equipment and learning activities are collaborating to impact on interaction quality.

Previous studies suggested that computational thinking is an important skill that schools should start equipping children with from primary school education. This study proposes way to develop a mobile app coding curriculum in primary 4 to 6 to nurture students’ computational thinking. It will guide students to undergo learning stages from developing their own codes and combining with others’ work to create their own apps and staging their apps to gain confidence and recognition of performance in coding. An example of mathematic game in the curriculum is selected as a case study to illustrate in this study how it incorporates the elements of computational thinking in the coding activities progressively. It is believed that the proposed way of curriculum development paves a learning path which may drive students’ interest in coding and students could develop computational thinking skills progressively

Computer-supported cognitive tools (CT) featuring visualization are promising e-resources that can support, guide and mediate the cognitive processes of learners in mathematics. This study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of a specially designed CT with manipulative visualization scaffolds for supporting the development of the concept of average using bar charts in classroom teaching. One teacher and 28 learners from a primary school participated. Both quantitative and qualitative data were confirmative with the use of the designed CT. An effective pedagogy achieving a significant improvement over the learners’ learning outcomes was designed. Both the teacher and the learners showed preference for using the CT to teach or learn the target topic, and agreed visualization of the CT aided the teaching and learning of the way to estimate the average in bar charts with the concept of “transferring the excess to the inadequate while keeping the total frequency constant”.

An online community for promoting students to naturally develop true interest and sustainable habit of Chinese reading has been set up among six primary schools in Hong Kong. The approach of Reading of Tomorrow is adopted, which integrates the rationale of Modeled Sustained Silent Reading (MSSR) and the use of a game-based learning platform “Bookstore of Tomorrow”. This paper shares the first-phase experience of this online reading community, of which a total of 534 students across Grade 4 to Grade 6 in the six collaborating schools participated in the half-year Reading of Tomorrow activities for reading books according to own interest, sharing personal reading records, making book recommendations to peers, and reading peers’ book recommendations. In the student questionnaire survey, the participating students positively perceived the impact of the Reading of Tomorrow approach on motivating them to not only keep habit and increase interest in Chinese reading, but also to explore new reading topics and develop new thinking ways through sharing book recommendations with peers using the “Bookstore of Tomorrow” platform. In the focus group interviews, the participating teachers acknowledged the potential of the Reading of Tomorrow approach to influence students to increase reading frequency and widen reading topics; and suggested the need to focus on promoting students to interact with peers more for sharing personal comments and feelings after reading books. Implications are discussed for the online reading community to sustain students’ motivation and interest in reading extensively for learning new knowledge and developing creative thinking.

There is a growing interest for Computational Thinking (CT) for the last decade. Most studies focus on teaching CT skills in K-12 level. In higher education, applying CT methods over all disciplines still needs cross institute movement, proper teaching tools and assessment procedure. In this paper we discuss the potential of applying CT methods in the mathematics courses at university level. With the inspiration of the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory, we suggest that applying CT methods in mathematics benefits students’ understanding of concepts and overcomes the drawbacks of traditional pedagogy. We study the case of introducing the limit of a sequence, which is a fundamental concept in calculus. An algorithm, inspired by the ε-N definition, is designed to find suitable N given a specific ε with exhaustion methods. Based on the algorithm designed, a game that help to introduce the ε-N definition of the limit of a sequence is presented as an example. The game would be developed on mobile devices for easy accessibility and for catering the trend of mobile device.

This pilot study compared the difference in secondary school students’ perception of smart classrooms between Beijing and Hong Kong using the Smart Classroom Scale (SCS). The study found that students in Beijing had more advanced requirement in physical construction of smart classrooms, while students in Hong Kong had higher expectation on pedagogical activities and deep technology usage in smart classrooms to their counterparts in Beijing. There were significant differences in scales of physical design, learning experience, flexibility, learning data, differentiation, investigation, and cooperation in the SCS. These differences were related to the investment on information technology infrastructure, and pedagogical conception of learning and teaching in smart classrooms which guide the design of learning and teaching activities. The results indicated that the students’ perception to smart learning environment was affected by both educational technology investment and classroom pedagogical culture backgrounds. Both Beijing and Hong Kong students had the lowest score in learning data scale, this indicated that the smart use of learning data for pedagogical purpose was not yet thoroughly understood by secondary school students in smart classrooms.

To enhance the learners’ performance and learning efficiency on e-learning platform is an essential issue in current teaching and learning engagement. This paper applies IT techniques and analysis methods to visualize the learners’ user relationship on the discussion board of Moodle based on the replying order and times they made in the selected topics/forum in a Moodle course, which will be very useful in the future for embedding the visualization into large-scale systems and further development of related applications. We mainly first extract the inner relation of users’ participation in one/several selected discussion topics or a whole forum of a certain course. Then we visualize the user participation relation using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provided by D3.js with aesthetic graph visualization. Our visualization with directed graph (digraph) structures provides easy understanding of users’ network connections in topics/forum, and the weights of the connections indicating the replying times are shown both numerically on edges and visually by the thickness of edges. Digraph is applied here to indicate different replying order. We propose to perform visualization construction and representation via PHP with latest advanced programming libraries of jQuery and D3.js, while easy control of tree-structured menu for user relation visualization is realized by jsTree. In the experiments, our method consistently demonstrates high-quality detailed visualization of users’ underlying relation structure they belong to, which may benefit the further study of improving the learning efficiency on e-learning platform.

This paper aims to critically review how we can incorporate technology in school education to provide students with the critical skills needed for the 21st century. This paper will discuss how the knowledge economy demands a new set of survival skills from our students, and how appropriate use of pedagogical use of technology can enhance the quality of school education in the twenty-first century. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) framework and Active-Constructive-Interactive (ICAP) framework have been reviewed to examine the important balance of content, technology and pedagogy in designing and implementing effective e-learning classrooms for our students. The design of an online automated writing evaluation system has been examined to evaluate how it can improve students’ English writing and their 21st century skills. This system will be put into practice in the next stage of this study.

A study was conducted for creating digital classrooms to support students to learn subject knowledge and develop information literacy competency as well as critical thinking skills. A total of 144 students in four Secondary 1 classes in a secondary school in Hong Kong were invited to participate in the study. In the 12 trial lessons, every three students shared a Tablet PC for learning the topic “Air Pollution Problems in Hong Kong” in the Integrated Humanities subject. After the trial teaching, the students and teachers were interviewed about their perception of the support from the designed digital classrooms. The study found that the students and teachers positively perceived the support from the designed digital classrooms on developing subject knowledge, information literacy competency and critical thinking skills. Three recommendations are made for enhancing the pedagogical designs in digital classrooms that emphasize the use of mobile technology.

With respect to the increasing trend that students acquire information from the Internet for their formal or informal learning, we aim at analyzing the use of social bookmarking to help students collaboratively access useful and creditable Web resources, facilitating collaborative learning. We also investigate the use of social bookmarking for after-school learning. Social bookmarking allows users to search for, tag, and share Web resources, and hence recommend students Web resources that are potentially useful and relevant. Experiments were conducted to study how social bookmarking can improve the quality of the acquired Web resource. In particular, students using social bookmarking could acquire a more focused and high quality set of Web resources compared with students not using social bookmarking.

In this paper, we report on the findings with regard to classroom activities and their time use in a number of mobile technology-mediated classrooms at Hong Kong. The data was collected from a mobile learning project specifically designed to promote students’ group and independent learning across a range of subject disciplines through using mobile devices within school environment. A total of 30 lessons in 10 primary and secondary schools were videotaped and analyzed. Results indicate that mobile devices can support establishing a well-balanced structure of classroom activities controlled by both teachers and students, where about 40% of the total class time was allocated to direct teaching and 40% was assigned to students’ learning in independent and/or collaborative ways.

The aim of this study is to model a learning process for construction of subject matter knowledge. An Internet-based fraction-learning integrated learning environment (IFILE) has been designed to model the learning process. The IFILE models the domain, teaching and learner's knowledge in the form of a learning situation, the graphical partitioning model (GPM) for meaning making; an affordance model for learning fraction equivalence, the prerequisite knowledge for learning fraction addition/subtraction; and a model of learner's knowledge for fostering the production of cognitive residue. The design of the GPM is originated from the nature of the subject matter. An affordance model for learning fraction equivalence is derived from an earlier evaluation study of the authors' GPM prototype. The IFILE is then built by integrating the GPM, the affordance model and a model of learner's knowledge for developing learning properties of the constructivists' view such as constructiveness, cumulativeness, self-regulatedness and reflectiveness.