8,231 research outputs found

    Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course

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    Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of Kanban into the course

    Sensory Substitution, Key to Inclusive Learning

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    Visually impaired students, in primary education, encounter unique challenges while learning creative skills, exploring artistic expression and developing problem-solving skills, because so much instructional content is delivered visually. Sensory substitution—an approach that replaces visual information with feedback from other intact senses like touch, sound, taste or smell—provides an opportunity to address those challenges. Through the use of sensory substitution, this thesis proposes concrete ways to capitalize on the enhanced abilities of visually impaired primary school students. The research outcome of this thesis is a system of templates that puts these enhanced abilities to work for visually impaired students, to support them while they learn creative skills and practice problem-solving in a classroom setting. Each template contains a lesson that can be learned by using the process of paper quilling. The templates work equally well for sighted and visually impaired students, since all will be able to understand the lesson by using the sense of touch, as they learn by making

    Fujaba hits the Wall(-e)

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    With the ever increasing pervasiveness of software in every day's life, it is quite easy to explain children the importance of software development. Especially when using gadgets such as LEGO robots, one can fascinate young pupils. It is much harder though to and fair link to the actual educational and research programs from a particular university without blowing the audience away with details of a particular Java framework. This paper illustrates how one can use Fujaba to involve children from 8 to 18 years old in realistic requirements elicitation workshops. The children implicitly get in touch with the object-oriented paradigm by playing in the real world the communication between objects in a robot's computer. Fujaba's visual object browser provides a convincing means to illustrate that the game adequately represents the robot's internals

    Solving constraints within a graph based dependency model by digitising a new process of incrementally casting concrete structures

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    The mechanisation of incrementally casting concrete structures can reduce the economic and environmental cost of the formwork which produces them. Low-tech versions of these forms have been designed to produce structures with cross-sectional continuity, but the design and implementation of complex adaptable formworks remains untenable for smaller projects. Addressing these feasibility issues by digitally modelling these systems is problematic because constraint solvers are the obvious method of modelling the adaptable formwork, but cannot acknowledge the hierarchical relationships created by assembling multiple instances of the system. This thesis hypothesises that these opposing relationships may not be completely disparate and that simple dependency relationships can be used to solve constraints if the real procedure of constructing the system is replicated digitally. The behaviour of the digital model was correlated with the behaviour of physical prototypes of the system which were refined based on digital explorations of its possibilities. The generated output is assessed physically on the basis of its efficiency and ease of assembly and digitally on the basis that permutations can be simply described and potentially built in reality. One of the columns generated by the thesis will be cast by the redesigned system in Lyon at the first F2F (file to factory) continuum workshop

    Student Teaching and Research Laboratory Focusing on Brain-computer Interface Paradigms - A Creative Environment for Computer Science Students -

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    This paper presents an applied concept of a brain-computer interface (BCI) student research laboratory (BCI-LAB) at the Life Science Center of TARA, University of Tsukuba, Japan. Several successful case studies of the student projects are reviewed together with the BCI Research Award 2014 winner case. The BCI-LAB design and project-based teaching philosophy is also explained. Future teaching and research directions summarize the review.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for EMBC 2015, IEEE copyrigh

    Design & Development of a Robotic System Using LEGO Mindstorm

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    This research presents a design and development of robotic system based on LEGO Mindstorm kit. The system is capable in operating an off-line programming method, starting from its programming sequences until robotic implementation of the program. During early stages, the research is emphasis more towards designing a robotic system using RoboLab software and C++ programming language. A robotic hardware system has been developed using LEGO Mindstorm kit. The robotic model acts as a prototype or test-bed for programming execution. The model involves motorize movement, sensors detection and machine vision to be manipulated by the programmers inside their programs. Since the model is built using LEGO bricks, the model is fully customized, in term of its applications, to perform any relevant tasks. Ultimately, the algorithm development program designed earlier is linked up directly to the robotic model for program implementation and verification. For this research, several set of robots by using Lego has been developed and it uses LeJos and C programming techniques as a platform. A Java-based robot development tool has been set up as alternative programming methods incorporating LeJos and the controller. A prototype of a mobile robot based on Lego successfully implemented by using PIC and can be controlled through voice recognition

    ARtonomous: Introducing Middle School Students to Reinforcement Learning Through Virtual Robotics

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    Typical educational robotics approaches rely on imperative programming for robot navigation. However, with the increasing presence of AI in everyday life, these approaches miss an opportunity to introduce machine learning (ML) techniques grounded in an authentic and engaging learning context. Furthermore, the needs for costly specialized equipment and ample physical space are barriers that limit access to robotics experiences for all learners. We propose ARtonomous, a relatively low-cost, virtual alternative to physical, programming-only robotics kits. With ARtonomous, students employ reinforcement learning (RL) alongside code to train and customize virtual autonomous robotic vehicles. Through a study evaluating ARtonomous, we found that middle-school students developed an understanding of RL, reported high levels of engagement, and demonstrated curiosity for learning more about ML. This research demonstrates the feasibility of an approach like ARtonomous for 1) eliminating barriers to robotics education and 2) promoting student learning and interest in RL and ML.Comment: In Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children (IDC '22
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