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The dissertation 'Educational Simulation in Task Situations' is focused on a new medium - educational simulation, which is starting to establish itself in the field of education. This work is examining educational simulations from three different points of view: 1) the acceptance of educational simulations in the school environment, 2) the interactivity of learning material, and 3) the authenticity of learning material. The experimental results are divided into three separate chapters according to the respective viewpoint. The investigation focused on acceptance in the first chapter draws from the evaluation of 34 Czech teachers and more than 1000 students, who both evaluated the benefits and shortcomings of particular educational simulations that were used by the teachers and their students. The experiment on interactivity (N = 152) in the second chapter is focused on the experimental comparison of learning material with activated interactive features and learning material with deactivated features. The third experiment on authenticity (N = 48) compares teaching material using authentic media sequences and the same material converted into an animated form. All three main chapters contain a theoretical review of the respective topic and our own experimental research. The methodology is based on the...

This work represents the entire process behind the creation of AnimalEvolution. Ani- malEvolution is a sandbox game simulating an ecosystem that is filled with evolving organisms and it's up to the player to find its balance. The gameplay consists mainly of creating new species of organisms and then observing them in the ecosystem with a few ways to tip the scales. The game is, in its essence a successor to SPORE, Equilinox and Thrive. It captures the freedom of SPORE, the equity od Equilinox and adds a hint of realism which is the pride of Thrive. The first chapter offers a look into the above mentioned titles. In the second chapter follows the analysis of their features and the design process behind AnimalEvolution. The following chapter offers the programmer's documentation with a few notes explaining the most important implementation decisions made. Last but not least, the final chapter offers user documentation and an example of interpretation of the data that the game produces. 1

This work deals with the teaching of computer science and programming at high school, specifically how its teaching from various perspectives would suit students who have decided to continue in computer science at university. The main goal of this research was to find out what motivates students to continue to an IT-oriented school and which materials they used (either in school lessons or self-study) that they would recommend to other students or teachers for their lessons. In addition, part of the research dealt with various aspects of teaching programming (suitable programming language, development environment, who an ideal programming teacher is like and what they do). I also resear- ched the teaching of computer science: what all students should take from the lessons, what topic to devote time to and how much, or how to motivate students and maintain their computer science/programming enthusiasm. The research happened in two parts. The first part was quantitative and was done using the method of a questionnaire survey, which was attended by 297 respondents (university students of computer science). The second part, based on the results of the first part, was of a qualitative nature and was performed using the focus group method. Four focus group meetings took place, which were attended by a total of 17...