A study on teaching basic programming paired a Universitas Brawijaya researcher with a scientist from LIPI, the institute later folded into BRIN.
In 2022, a study on how vocational school students learn basic programming brought together researchers from two different corners of Indonesian science. One worked at Universitas Brawijaya's computer science faculty. The other was based at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, known by its Indonesian initials LIPI, in a research group built around machine learning.
The paper, titled "An Interactive Learning Environment System on Basic Programming Subjects: Effects of Learning Outcomes and Question Level Patterns," appeared in JTEV, a journal of electrical and vocational engineering published in Padang. It tested a teaching system built around problem posing and problem solving exercises, tried out with 36 vocational school students split evenly into an experimental group and a control group. Herman Tolle, of Universitas Brawijaya's Media, Game, and Mobile Technologies research group, the group known on campus as MGM, coauthored the paper with Ahmad Afif Supianto, listed under LIPI's Machine Learning Research Group, Research Center for Informatics. Two more coauthors, from a polytechnic in Banjarmasin and a university in Japan, rounded out the author list.
LIPI's Machine Learning Research Group no longer exists under that name today. In 2021, Indonesia folded LIPI and several other science agencies into one body, the National Research and Innovation Agency, known as BRIN. The 2022 paper still lists Supianto under LIPI, which places this coauthorship at the tail end of LIPI's existence rather than describing any current arrangement between MGM and BRIN.
The study itself was modest in scope, a classroom intervention measured against a control group at a single vocational school, tracking how students answered questions of different difficulty levels as they worked through the material. It is, on its own terms, a real and citable instance of an MGM researcher publishing alongside a scientist from Indonesia's national research institute, worth recording precisely rather than dressed up as something larger.
