A guide to the didactics of biology

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Vladimír Zeleňák (ed.)

Proceedings of Abstracts of the Student Scientific Conference of the Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice

A characteristic feature of education at high-quality universities — among which the Faculty of Science at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University (UPJŠ) in Košice proudly belongs — is the close connection between education and scientific research. Students gain knowledge in their field of study not only through theoretical coursework in individual disciplines, but also through active involvement in solving specific scientific tasks as part of research teams. This can occur during the development of final theses or through participation in the Student Research Assistant Program (ŠPVS), which was revitalized at the faculty in 2015.

The Student Scientific Conference (ŠVK) is one of the faculty’s traditional events, organized during the Faculty’s Science Days as part of Sciencefest. By its very nature, it fits seamlessly into the aforementioned framework of combining education with research, and it has long enjoyed great popularity and student interest. In 2016, the conference featured presentations by 125 students of the Faculty of Science at UPJŠ in Košice, across 16 thematic sections. This collection of abstracts provides an overview of the focus and goals of the student projects. We believe it will serve as inspiration for other potential participants of future conferences and will also be of interest to the broader public, offering additional insight into the faculty's activities.

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Peter Kollár a kol. 

Skriptá Základné fyzikálne praktikum II. sú určené pre študentov Prírodovedeckej fakulty UPJŠ v Košiciach študujúcich na študijných programoch fyzika a medziodborových programoch v kombinácii s fyzikou. Obsahom skrípt sú úlohy z elektriny, magnetizmu a optiky. Podľa študijných programov sú zaradené do 3.semestra bakalárskeho štúdia, v ktorom by už študenti mali mať absolvovaný predmet všeobecná fyzika II. (elektrina a magnetizmus). Súčasťou každej úlohy sú základné poznatky venované javom, ktoré sú obsahom samotnej úlohy.

Autori

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Peter Fedoročko (eds.)

From June 14 to June 17, 2022, the 8th annual Spring School for Doctoral Students at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice will take place in Liptovský Ján. The scientific program of the spring school will comprise 3 plenary lectures by leading scientific experts and 1 workshop. Doctoral students will present their research papers in two sections: 22 doctoral students of Faculty of Public Administration, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Arts, and 26 doctoral students of Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Science. The scientific programme of the spring school will also include a panel discussion with the management of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.

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Ivana Šišoláková - Radka Gorejová - Jana Shepa - Renáta Oriňaková

The university textbook "Advanced Electrochemical Methods" is a teaching aid intended for master's or doctoral students studying electrochemical subjects at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.

These textbooks follow and further develop textbooks focused on the basic electrochemical methods currently used in modern research. The presented teaching texts are processed in sixteen clear chapters, where they provide a theoretical principle and derivation of electrochemical processes and mechanisms in individual methods. Teaching texts also consist of practical laboratory exercises, in which students can try out the real application of the studied electrochemical methods.

The practical tasks are focused primarily on the demonstration of research that is carried out at our workplace. Students will be able to try, for example, electrochemical modification of the electrode surface, preparation of electrochemical sensors for the determination of analytes, preparation and characterization of a dye-sensitized solar cell or electrochemical evolution of hydrogen.

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Ivan Potočňák a kol.

The textbook represents a study literature on the subject of General chemistry, which is a compulsory subject of bachelor courses in Chemistry and Chemistry -  interdisciplinary study, the first year. This textbook contains 15 + 2 chapters in the whole range of 170 pages that follow the content of lectures and by means of examples and theoretical tasks consolidate and extend knowledge gained from lectures.

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Mária Ganajová-Ivana Sotáková-Petra Letošníková

The conference proceedings FORMATIVE 2025 – Implementing Formative Assessment in Schools Together constitute the output of an online conference organised by the Institute of Chemical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, in cooperation with the National Institute of Education and Youth in Bratislava, within the framework of the KEGA project No. 001UPJŠ-4/2023. These proceedings present current knowledge, experience, and examples of good practice in implementing formative assessment in primary, secondary, and university teaching, with an emphasis on the use of digital tools. The papers address the foundations of formative assessment in the context of curricular changes and the ongoing educational reform, as well as specific didactic procedures for its implementation in the teaching of science and social science subjects, including mathematics, Slovak language, and foreign languages. Particular attention is paid to the development of professional teaching competences, formative assessment strategies, providing targeted feedback, and promoting students’ active participation in the assessment process. These proceedings also present the Digilib digital library, a tool developed to support the creation and management of formative assessment processes within the school environment. This publication is intended for experts in pedagogy and didactics, teachers at all levels of education, student teachers, digital coordinators, and all those interested in educational innovation and in improving the quality of teaching through formative assessment.

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Jozef Strečka

The present textbook deals with exactly solved models and their diverse applications in several branches of physics such as mathematical physics, statistical physics, condensed matter physics and so on. Exactly soluble models are currently considered as an inspiring research field in its own right, which regrettably requires a considerable knowledge of sophisticated mathematics. Accordingly, my primary ambition was to provide an intro- ductory course for undergraduate students that would cover the simplest exactly solved models, whose rigorous solutions are available even after modest calculation. The present textbook should be therefore regarded as an auxiliary graduate-level textbook, which should serve as the student’s guide on this beautiful but surely intricate subject.

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Peter Kollár

The textbook Semiconductor Elements was developed gradually over the past years as an aid for second-year master's students in condensed matter physics. It is intended to support students’ understanding of lectures, considering that important texts, mathematical relationships, and illustrations are provided in advance in the form they will be presented during the lecture.

This allows students to supplement individual pages with their own notes during the lecture, either electronically or in printed form. In this way, a study aid is created for the student, which I believe will help with the final review of knowledge gained throughout the semester in preparation for the exam. This textbook is not meant to serve as standalone literature but is designed to assist orientation in the literature, which is abundant in English but mostly written for scientists, researchers, and students for whom this topic is central and not just one of many parts of their education. Therefore, it is not allocated a larger scope in the study program.

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Andrea Morovská Turoňová - Renáta Oriňaková - František Kaľavský 

The university textbooks "Practical Exercises in Physical Chemistry" are intended as teaching literature for students of the 2nd year of the Chemistry study program and the 3rd year of the interdisciplinary study program at the Faculty of Science of the Pavel Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.

The three chapters summarize the basic knowledge of thermodynamics, electrochemistry and kinetics, the next chapter deals with the measurement of some other physico-chemical quantities. The tasks developed on the basis of cooperation with the Criminalistics and Expertise Institute of the Police in Košice, which also participates in the innovation of practical teaching, are also very attractive and interesting for students. Thematic units are updated and supplemented by new knowledge, principles as well as detailed working procedures using new instrumentation.

The aim of laboratory exercises in physical chemistry is to illustrate and confirm the physicochemical laws and correlations that apply to the quantitative description of chemical phenomena. Students will learn to use instruments and equipment that occur in physico-chemical laboratories, they will learn the principles of accurate and correct quantitative measurement of physical quantities, important from a chemical point of view. They can also develop professional and scientific communication skills, and we want to support their creative approach to making measurement protocols.

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Dušan Barabas a kol.

The presented text is the final product of work within the project "Tanuljunk egymástól!/Let’s Learn from Each Other!" The project emerged from long-standing contacts between the staff of the Centre for Regional Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geography at the Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, as a natural effort to expand mutual cooperation. The first step was collaboration within Interreg II projects, involving a broad range of institutions from both academic and non-academic environments. This initial attempt was unsuccessful due to administrative errors. Consequently, a project titled HUSK/0801/1.6.1/0003 "Tanuljunk egymástól!/Let’s Learn from Each Other!" was prepared and developed in agreement with the Hungarian side. It was approved and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the Hungary-Slovakia Cross-Border Cooperation Program 2007–2013.

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Rudolf Gális

The presented work provides basic knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics in a completely new multimedia format. The scope of the knowledge presented is mainly focused on stellar astrophysics and supplemented by cosmology beyond the title of the work.

A new approach in this work is the large proportion of visual materials, graphs, and video clips, contrasted with the brevity of the accompanying text. Such a form of presenting knowledge in this field is unprecedented in Slovakia, and therefore this work can be considered a completely innovative piece. It should be emphasized that the engaging form of the presented knowledge does not come at the expense of its content. The work contains all the necessary information that a physics student, especially one with a pedagogical focus, should master. The work can also be an invaluable aid to teachers in secondary and even primary schools, as well as professional astronomers in popularizing astronomical knowledge.

This suggests that the work covers a relatively wide range of needs at various institutions dealing with astronomy, from universities, through faculties of education and grammar schools, to observatories, planetariums, and astronomy clubs.

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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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Mária Vilková-Zuzana Kudličková-Ján Elečko
This study material is intended for students of chemistry and related disciplines interested in applied nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and physical chemistry. It offers practice-oriented tasks designed to develop skills in NMR spectroscopy, quantitative analysis, and data interpretation. Students learn modern approaches to determining physicochemical parameters (e.g., partition coefficients, pKa values, keto–enol equilibria, or enantiomeric excess) and gain experience with software tools for spectrum processing.
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Ľubomír Antoni-Stanislav Krajči

An important part of theoretical computer science is the problem of Turing machines. This computational model has two basic properties: like any other computational program, the software of a Turing machine is composed of instructions, but in its case they are all of a single type. Every other (so far known) computer program can be transformed into a Turing machine program without loss of information. While the second feature reduces the question of what a calculator cannot do to the question of what a Turing machine cannot do, the first feature allows a much simpler investigation of such a question. Using this computational model, we can thus find concrete problems that no automaton can ever deal with (perhaps the most famous is the problem of the Turing machine stopping). Their existence demonstrates the fundamental limitations of (not only ideal) computational means, and thus encourages both criticality and humility in our thinking.

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Jozef Strečka- Katarína Karl’ová (eds.)

Zborník obsahuje program a abstrakty workshopu s názvom: 1st Workshop on Perspective Electron Spin Systems for Future Quantum Technologies, ktorý sa bude konať 28.-29. júna 2022 v Košiciach. Workshop je organizovaný Prírodovedeckou fakultou Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach a Ústavom experimentálnej fyziky Slovenskej akadémie vied v Košiciach s finančnou podporou Agentúry na podporu výskumu a vývoja. Ústrednými témami konferencie budú súčasné problémy kvantovej fyziky - kvantovej teórie magnetizmu spinových a elektrónových štruktúr, exotických kvantových spinových stavov, kvantového previazania, kvantových fázových prechodov, topologického kvantového počítania a kvantového spracovania informácie. Účastníci workshopu budú prezentovať originálne pôvodné výsledky svojho výskumu, ktoré môžu zásadným spôsobom ovplyvniť vývoj budúcich kvantových technológií.   

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Valéria Skřivánková 

Predložený učebný text sa pokúša ilustrovať možné aplikácie Teórie pravdepodobnosti na príkladoch z oblastí (vo fyzike, chémii,  biológii, ekonomike, finančníctve, atď.), ktoré sú spestrené o úlohy na hľadanie optimálnej stratégie.

Text je určený predovšetkým poslucháčom Prírodovedeckej fakulty UPJŠ, budúcim učiteľom matematiky, študentom odboru matematika a informatika prípadne iným záujemcom, ktorí budú aplikovať pravdepodobnostné metódy pri riešení reálnych problémov. Obsahom pokrýva prvú časť predmetu "Pravdepodobnosť a štatistika".

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