Talented and capable individuals who strive to improve their activities, create and implement important projects for modern society work and study at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University. One of them is a representative of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics – Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics P.V.Merzlykin, who took part in the competition «Освітні гранти», which was first organized by “SoftServe” company for university lecturers.
More than 50 universities took part in the competition, submitting 84 applications that included developments of courses in big data, econometrics, design, IT project management, machine learning, design thinking in application design and others.
«Освітні гранти» is a unique program that provides financial support to each winner to develop a new or upgrade an existing technical course taught in specialties such as applied mathematics, software engineering, computer science, information systems and technology, computer engineering, cybersecurity, applied linguistics etc.
During the selection of courses, the criteria of integrity of the proposal, innovation of the proposed topic, compliance of the course with requirements for graduates, the presence of a regional component and scalability were used.
The best developments were evaluated by five members of the jury (teachers and mentors of IT-courses, “SoftServe IT Academy”, IT engineers of this company).
The lecturer of our university has developed a course in computer science “A Night in the Lonesome October”, which introduces students to the basics of machine representation of programs, the basic syntax of the assembler, tools for working with binary code, methods of protecting programs from hacking. The proposed mini-course can be included as a part of the courses “Security of Information and Communication Systems” or “Operating Systems and System Programming”.
P.V.Merzlykin told (translated): “The idea of this course arose in the autumn of 2019, when it appeared as one of the laboratory works of the information security course. It also originates from the novel by Roger Zelazny which has the same name and is a setting for everything that happens on the course. Students act anonymously under the pseudonyms of selected characters and have to “break” each other’s program code while protecting their own. The gameplay is a bit like Olympiad and hackathon on a programming, although it is neither one, nor the other in its purest form. It should be noted that the proposed course is not a solely course of information security and does not even have to be the part of it. In particular, last year it was offered as a content module of a system programming course. In an adapted form, the course was taught within the regional summer school of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of the Small Academy of Sciences. In other words, the course can be considered as a separate educational product, which, in addition to the classic academic format, can also exist in the form of summer schools, programming tournaments, guest courses at universities, special choice courses etc. and flexibly adapted and scaled according to the needs. In the 2021/2022 academic year, this course is taught as a part of the course “Operating Systems and System Programming for I-18 group”.
According to the result of the competition, one of the five winners was a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Associate Professor P.V.Merzlykin, who received a grant and the opportunity to consult with the company’s experts.
We congratulate Mr. P. Merzlykin on presenting an important development for the university and winning a large-scale competition of a global IT company!