A guide to the didactics of biology

E-book

Mária Vilková - Monika Garberová - Michal Goga

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is currently a widely used analytical tool that finds application in many fields of science and technology. The broadening of its practical use brings with it the necessity to create educational texts appropriate to the given scientific discipline.

This university textbook is intended for students of biology and serves as a supplement to the study materials for the advanced master's course "Biology of Lichens." At the same time, it represents a useful resource for master's and doctoral students involved in research, helping them interpret NMR spectra and present basic theoretical concepts.

The textbook briefly describes the important aspects of each NMR spectroscopic technique without delving excessively into the physical principles of individual methods or complex mathematical analyses. In this edition, the structures of lichen metabolites have been included, which students will isolate, purify, and identify using various analytical methods during practical exercises. An entire chapter is dedicated to a detailed description of solving the NMR spectra of isolated metabolites, with each step in elucidating the structures of both known and unknown metabolites explained in detail. The solved tasks are followed by numerous unsolved examples, including high-resolution 1D and 2D NMR spectra of metabolites, intended to further develop the acquired knowledge and skills of students and doctoral candidates in structure elucidation using NMR spectroscopy.

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Martin Bačkor - Miriam Bačkorová

The proposed text focuses on the history of studying biology, medicine, and pharmacy as scientific disciplines from prehistoric times through antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era. The text chronologically organizes the most significant figures in the history of biological scientific disciplines, outlines key characteristics of major historical discoveries, and reevaluates their significance from the perspective of 21st-century science.

The educational text is chronologically divided into the most significant periods of civilization development. The last two completed centuries—the 19th and 20th—are subdivided into major life science fields due to the unprecedented growth of biological disciplines and the resulting volume of acquired information.

Since it can sometimes be challenging in science to define what constitutes the past versus the present of a particular discipline, we have excluded significant biological discoveries from the early 21st century, which are typically regarded as the “present” of biology.

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Zuzana Vargová - Miroslav Almáši - Juraj Kuchár - Jana Dinajová 

The script „Základné laboratórne praktikum z anorganickej chémie“ builds on previous editions of the script, with some thematic units updated and supplemented with new knowledge, principles, and detailed work procedures.

This script is intended as a teaching aid for first-year students of the chemistry and interdisciplinary study programs at the Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. The introductory part of the volume acquaints students with safety regulations that they should follow during work in a chemical laboratory. Subsequently, in five chapters, basic laboratory techniques are described in detail, which students will use in the further part of the practices for preparing inorganic compounds. These chapters are enriched with illustrative images created using the freely distributable ACDFreeLabs 10 program or taken from literature listed at the end of the script. Some images were created by the authors, and others were taken from the catalog of Fisher Slovakia, s.r.o., which provided written permission for their use. The chapters describing the preparation of inorganic compounds are organized according to their composition, from simple elements or molecules, through binary compounds, acids, and salts, to complex compounds.

Within this subject, students should apply their theoretical knowledge gained during lectures on General Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry and thereby acquire basic practical experience and skills that they will use in further studies.

The last two chapters were developed based on cooperation with Duslo a.s., Production Plant Strážske, which participates in the innovation of practical teaching through direct involvement of experts from practice as part of the KEGA project No. 008UPJŠ-4/2018.

Authors

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Erik Čižmár

Textbook Automation of Laboratory Experiments in LabVIEW environment is devoted to the basics of graphical programming and shows the way how to communicate with measuring equipment and Arduino development boards in LabVIEW. The basic concepts of creating a virtual instrument and its interactive user environment are introduced. Three physical tasks are presented, the practical implementation of which takes place with the use appropriate instrumentation and LabVIEW. Practical tasks are dedicated to measuring the transmission characteristics of a low-pass RC filter, measuring the natural resonant frequency of a quartz tuning fork using the heterodyne pulse method, and mapping the magnetic field of a permanent magnet using Arduino.

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E-book

Ján Füzer

Auxiliary teaching material for the course General Physics III – Oscillations, Waves, and Optics is intended for students of single-subject and interdisciplinary studies of physics.

The content provides a basic outline of the material covered, without detailed explanations, with an emphasis on the physical method of thinking using the simplest elements of higher mathematics. The presented text does not aim to replace the recommended textbooks, but rather to help students navigate the subject matter. Recommended literature can be found at the end of the text.

The teaching material contains the basic framework of the lectures and is supplemented and revised each year, with lectures enriched by supporting demonstration experiments.

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E-book

Juraj Černák

A significant part of inorganic chemistry is coordination chemistry, which deals with coordination compounds. Coordination compounds are numerous because they arise from the combination of central atoms, mostly metals, with ligands, and every organic compound is a potential ligand. This is confirmed by a recent report that American scientists M. Brookhart, C. Schauer, and their colleagues from universities in North Carolina and Washington described the preparation of a rhodium complex with methane as a ligand.

This textbook is based on the long-term experience of the author in teaching and testing this subject. The subject is well-covered in several textbooks of varying difficulty in English; their partial list can be found by readers in the list of used literature at the end of this textbook. On the other hand, in Slovak language, coordination chemistry issues are only marginally covered in several textbooks focused more on general inorganic chemistry but lack a comprehensive view on this topic. From this follows the goal of this proposed textbook - to cover the lack of study literature in this area for Slovak language.

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E-book

Pavol Mártonfi

The university textbook deals with the latest knowledge from the systematics of vascular plants in a clear manner. Vascular plants arose in the Silurian period in the Paleozoic, when the first primitive plants moved from water to dry land, which required evolutionary progress in the morphological and anatomical structure of these plants. During about 420 million years of the existence of vascular plants, several of their main groups have evolved: the spore vascular plants, including the lycopods (branch Lycopodiophyta) and group of ferns and related plants (branch Monilophyta), and the seed plants, including gymnosperms (branch Gymnospermae) and angiosperms ( Angiospermae), which currently dominate among plants. The textbook provides a brief but comprehensive overview of the main groups, orders and families of plants with their description, distribution, main representatives, while also addressing the useful properties of selected species. The work is complemented by an overview of the system of plants by Cronquist, Tachtadžjan, APG and an overview of the families of the Slovak flora, as well as a taxonomic index.

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E-book

Renáta Oriňáková (ed.)

Book of abstract

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Mária Ganajová

The current teaching of chemistry has its specific problems. On one hand, due to the shift of the focus of chemistry curriculum towards theoretical content, the difficulty of chemistry material has increased, and in connection with this, students' interest in chemistry has decreased.

The lack of student interest in chemistry is mostly supported by the opinion that it is precisely chemistry that significantly contributes to the deterioration of environmental quality. On the other hand, we live in an era where we encounter chemical products practically everywhere. It is necessary to learn the basics of chemistry as well as possible, which makes the question of increasing interest in chemistry education and improving its effectiveness very relevant. State educational programs have been introduced into Slovak schools as a foundation for the creation of school educational programs. These emphasize not only acquiring a certain amount of knowledge but also the development and enhancement of key and specific competencies of students, preparing them for lifelong learning and their application in life.

Therefore, increasing attention is being paid to one of the fundamental didactic tools for raising student activity in teaching, and thus improving the effectiveness of chemistry education – learning tasks. From both theory and practice of chemistry teaching, we know that learning tasks, questions, examples, exercises, etc., are among the important components of every teaching lesson. Learning tasks are applied in all phases of teaching – in the motivational phase, the phase of acquiring knowledge, the phase of consolidating knowledge, and the phase of checking the acquired knowledge. It is therefore clear that every teacher will sooner or later find themselves in a situation where they will have to select learning tasks from textbooks, workbooks, collections of problems and examples, or create them themselves.

This scientific monograph is intended for educational specialists and chemistry teachers, aiming to familiarize them with examples of various types and forms of learning tasks and the basics of their creation in chemistry. It can also be helpful for them in preparing certification works focused on test creation and their statistical evaluation.

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Adriana Zeleňáková

One of the fundamental characteristics of the magnetic state of ferromagnetic materials is the existence of a domain structure. The university textbook "MAGNETIC DOMAINS: SPECIAL PHYSICAL PRACTICE 1" is intended primarily for students of the Master's programme in Physics of Condensed Matter FKLm and for the PhD programme in Progressive Materials PMd within the profile subject Special Practice 1 at the Institute of Physical Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.  The textbook is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the basics of domain theory, including the history of domain observation and the specification of different types of energies in ferromagnetic body. The second chapter presents the relationship between domain structure and magnetisation processes in ferromagnetic materials The third chapter describes the different types of domain-wall interactions with the defect. The fourth chapter illustrates examples of domain structure in selected ferromagnetic body such as grain oriented and non-grain oriented electrical steels, amorphous and nanocrystalline ribbons. The fifth chapter summarises an overview of the different experimental methods used to visualise the domain structure and their advantages or disadvantages with respect to the structure of ferromagnetic materials. The last two chapters, the sixth and the seventh, are devoted to specific experimental tasks for observing the domain structure of a selected polycrystalline sample using the optical microscope Bitter powder method and the MFM (magnetic force microscopy) method. During the preparation of this undergraduate text, its individual parts were developed using the foreign language literature listed in the recommended references.

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E-book

Mária Kožurková

These university textbooks are intended for first-year master's degree students at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of UPJŠ in Košice. The scope and content of the works included in these scripts are primarily based on time and spatial constraints, taking into account the material demands of the tasks.

The aim of these scripts is to teach students basic microbiological techniques and to show them the importance of microorganisms in everyday life and their crucial role in nature. The exercises are designed to enhance students' technical skills and teach them to work according to safety principles.

The text is divided into 13 parts. Each part begins with an introduction to the theory related to the practice topic. The appendix includes a proposal for the preparation of protocols for individual exercises.

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Tatiana Kimáková

Táto vedecká monografia je komplexnou vedeckou prácou zameranou na prítomnosť a pôsobenie ortuti v životnom prostredí, ale aj na rizikové faktory zdravia, ktoré sú s ňou spojené. Monografia predstavuje charakteristiku ortuti v multidisciplinárnom zábere, prezentuje využitie v priemysle a v zdravotníctve, popisuje negatívne vplyvy ortuti v životnom prostredí, na zdravotný stav obyvateľstva. Zároveň prináša návrhy a odporúčania pre rizikové skupiny ľudí. Súčasťou monografie je komplexný výskum koncentrácie ortuti vo vzorkách komodít domácej i zahraničnej produkcie a vo vzorkách rastlín pomocou atómového absorpčného spektrometra AMA 254. Vedecká monografia je vhodná pre vedeckú komunitu, študentov medicínskych, veterinárnych, prírodovedných a poľnohospodárskych odborov ako aj pre študentov verejného zdravotníctva všetkých troch stupňov vysokoškolského štúdia. Monografia je učená aj pre všetkých záujemcov z radov informovanej verejnosti.

Autorka

E-publication

Soňa Király

The Book of Abstracts of The 9th International Conference on Novel Materials Fundamentals and Applications, NFA 2025, contains 46 contributions from the participants of this conference. This congress is primarily focused on novel materials, ranging from theory to practical applications, with the aim of demonstrating how fundamental discoveries can lead to innovative implementations. All contributions are inspiring and professionally prepared.

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E-book

Andrej Mock

Burda - Kováčov, Slovensko, 4.-7.10.2017

Abstracts of lectures by Czech and Slovak zoologists, ecologists, and physiologists, who study soil arthropods in the taxa Myriapoda and Oniscidea as model groups, presented at the 10th seminar in Kováčová near Chľaba, Slovakia.

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Božena Mihalíková - Ján Ohriska

This text is intended for first-year students in 76-12-8 ‘General Education Teaching’ in combinations with mathematics. It is based on the authors' lectures and their more than ten years of experience in teaching this subject at the Faculty of Education of the University of Applied Sciences. When writing it, the authors tried to take into account the specificity of mathematics teaching studies.

The present teaching text was not written due to the lack of textbooks on mathematical analysis. The reason for writing it was the authors' findings that the students do not have sufficient experience in working with specialized literature from secondary school, the difficulties for many of them (especially in the first semesters) are caused by even a slightly different interpretation, not rarely also by a change in labeling, which makes them miss the essence of the studied problem. The authors of the text did not set out to be original. Their aim was to make such a selection of topics as is necessary for a future teacher of mathematics and to choose such a method of interpretation which, in their opinion, is suitable for first-year students.

A good mastery of the curriculum (expansion of the mathematical apparatus and the related possibilities of applying other methods of proof as well as the acquisition of the necessary numerical skills) presupposes the use of other literary sources (textbooks, collections of problems) according to the teacher's recommendation.

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E-publication

Jozef Strečka-Katarína Karľová

The proceedings include the programme and abstracts of the workshop Magnetic Cooling and Frustrated Magnetism, held in Košice on October 27–29, 2025. The event is organized with the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR), the Faculty of Science of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, and the Slovak Research and Development Agency. The workshop focuses on current challenges in quantum physics, particularly frustrated magnetism and magnetic cooling. Participants will present original research results that may significantly contribute to the development of future quantum technologies.

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