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Currently in Slovakia, there is a strong need to attract more students for their future career in IT or science and technology. The motivation towards these subjects is an important issue at all levels of education and isin the main focus of the national project IT academy. One of its goals at upper secondary level is the introduction of classes with focus on informatics where teaching informatics and science is strengthened a great deal. Except from extra lessons on informatics a new interdisciplinary subject Informatics in science and mathematics is designed. Its main goal is to show interesting problems that can be solved using informatics concepts. For the physics part, we have designed teaching and learning materials on the concept of modeling. Developing models in the physics research cannot be conducted without knowledge of coding in a programming environment. Our main goal is to show students a similar modeling approach on situations that are simple and understandable to them. Students proceed similar way as researchers do, i.e. they get a problem, develop a model, manipulate with it, test the model and improve it to get better correspondence with experimental results. The modeling is conducted in dynamical modeling software where variables are represented by icons that can be a first step to coding in professional programming environment. In the paper we introduce a set of modeling activities designed for the purpose of the presented teaching subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is unacceptable for students not to master the basics of algorithms during their secondary school studies, moreover, not to understand the basic concepts of programming and program development. This article and presentation present the necessary results of our two researches. In our first research, the level of IT knowledge has been measured at Hungarian secondary vocational schools in Slovakia, focusing mainly on the concepts of programming and OOP knowledge. Our survey focuses on how familiar students are with basic terms of OOP such as: class, object, object-oriented programming, method and inheritance. The results are rather disappointing. We did a research related to the IT skills of students. From the results of the survey, we determined which educational methods we should use for reaching better results. It was created a set of courses for teaching OOP using the recommended educational methods, as well as we did a literature research regarding teaching and visualizing OOP. While teaching we used a visual application developed by one from authors of this article. The aim of developing the software was to create a visual environment that easily and playfully introduces the key concepts of OOP programming. At the end of the courses we proved that the visual application greatly increases the efficiency of learning and understanding the concepts of programming. Furthermore, the students' problem solving ability can be developed by the introduction of the visual methods. The developed application and the introduced method help the practical training of programming, and the students' programming skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]