Abstract
High failure and dropout rates are common in higher education institutions with introductory programming courses. Some researchers advocate that sometimes teachers don't use correct methods of assessment and that many students pass in programming without knowing how to program. In this paper authors describe the assessment methodology applied to a first year, first semester, Biomedical Engineering programming course (2015/2016). Students' programming skills were tested by playing a game in the first class, then they were assessed with three tests and a final exam, each with topics the authors considered fundamental for the students to master. A correlation analyses between the different types of tests and exam questions is done, to evaluate the most suitable, for assessing programming knowledge, showing that it is possible to use different question types as a pedagogical strategy, to assess student difficulty levels and programming skills, that help students acquire abstract, reasoning and algorithm thinking in an acceptable level. Also, it is shown that different forms of questions are equivalent to assess equal knowledge and that it is possible to predict the ability of a student to program at an early stage.

Abstract
We present a proposal for the local control of the nonlinearity in quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates induced by a local pinching of the transverse confining potential. We investigate the scattering of bright matter-wave solitons through a pinched potential using numerical simulations of the full three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation and the corresponding effective one-dimensional model with spatially varying nonlinearity.

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Catalytic computation, defined by Buhrman, Cleve, Koucký, Loff and Speelman (STOC 2014), is a space-bounded computation where in addition to our working memory we have an exponentially larger auxiliary memory which is full; the auxiliary memory may be used throughout the computation, but it must be restored to its initial content by the end of the computation. Motivated by the surprising power of this model, we set out to study the non-deterministic version of catalytic computation. We establish that non-deterministic catalytic log-space is contained in ZPP, which is the same bound known for its deterministic counterpart, and we prove that non-deterministic catalytic space is closed under complement (under a standard derandomization assumption). Furthermore, we establish hierarchy theorems for non-deterministic and deterministic catalytic computation. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Abstract
Data mining and machine learning algorithms can be employed to perform a variety of tasks. However, since most of these problems may depend on environments that change over time, performing classification tasks in dynamic environments has been a challenge in data mining research domain in the last decades. Currently, in the literature, the most common strategies used to detect changes are based on accuracy monitoring, which relies on previous knowledge of the data in order to identify whether or not correct classifications are provided. However, such a feedback can be infeasible in practical problems. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of current machine learning/data mining approaches proposed to deal with dynamic environments problems. The objective is to highlight the main drawbacks and open issues, as well as future directions and problems worthy of investigation. In addition, we provide the definitions of the main terms used to represent this problem in the literature, such as concept drift and novelty detection. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2016, 6:156-166. doi: 10.1002/widm.1184 For further resources related to this article, please visit the .