15,199 research outputs found
App creation in schools for different curricula subjects - lesson learned
The next generation of jobs will be characterized by an increased demand for
people with computational and problem solving skills. In Austria, computer
science topics are underrepresented in school curricula hence teaching time for
these topics is limited. From primary through secondary school, only a few
opportunities exist for young students to explore programming. Furthermore,
today's teachers are rarely trained in computer science, which impairs their
potential to motivate students in these courses. Within the "No One Left
Behind" (NOLB) project, teachers were supported to guide and assist their
students in their learning processes by constructing ideas through game making.
Thus, students created games that referred to different subject areas by using
the programming tool Pocket Code, an app developed at Graz University of
Technology (TU-Graz). This tool helps students to take control of their own
education, becoming more engaged, interested, and empowered as a result. To
ensure an optimal integration of the app in diverse subjects the different
backgrounds (technical and non-technical) of teachers must be considered as
well. First, teachers were supported to use Pocket Code in the different
subjects in school within the feasibility study of the project. Observed
challenges and difficulties using the app have been gathered. Second, we
conducted interviews with teachers and students to underpin our onsite
observations. As a result, it was possible to validate Pocket Codes' potential
to be used in a diverse range of subjects. Third, we focused especially on
those teachers who were not technically trained to provide them with a
framework for Pocket Code units, e.g., with the help of structured lesson plans
and predefined templates.Comment: 10 pages, 5 tables EduLearn 201
Going Stupid with EcoLab
In 2005, Railsback et al. proposed a very simple model ({\em Stupid
Model}) that could be implemented within a couple of hours, and later
extended to demonstrate the use of common ABM platform functionality. They
provided implementations of the model in several agent based modelling
platforms, and compared the platforms for ease of implementation of this simple
model, and performance. In this paper, I implement Railsback et al's Stupid
Model in the EcoLab simulation platform, a C++ based modelling platform,
demonstrating that it is a feasible platform for these sorts of models, and
compare the performance of the implementation with Repast, Mason and Swarm
versions
An Embedded Domain Specific Language to Model, Transform and Quality Assure Business Processes in Business-Driven Development
In Business-Driven Development (BDD), business process models are produced by business analysts. To ensure that the business requirements are satisfied, the IT solution is directly derived through a process of model refinement. If models do not contain all the required technical details or contain errors, the derived implementation would be incorrect and the BDD lifecycle would have to be repeated. In this project we present a functional domain specific language embedded in Haskell, with which: 1) models can rapidly be produced in a concise and abstract manner, 2) enables focus on the specifications rather than the implementation, 3) ensures that all the required details, to generate the executable code, are specified, 4) models can be transformed, analysed and interpreted in various ways, 5) quality assures models by carrying out three types of checks; by Haskell.s type checker, at construction-time and by functions that analyse the soundness of models, 6) enables users to define quality assured composite model transformations
An economic energy approach for queries on data centers
Energy consumption is an issue that involves all of us, both as individuals and as members of a society, and covers all our areas of activity. It is something so broad that its impact has important reflections on our social, cultural and financial structures. The domain of software, and in particular database systems, is not an exception. Although it seems to be a little bit strange to study the energy consumption of just one query, when we consider the execution of a a few thousand queries per second, quickly we see the importance of the querying consumption in the monthly account of any company that has a conventional data center. To demonstrate the energy consumption of queries in data centers, we idealized a small dashboard for monitoring and analyzing the sales of a company, and implemented all the queries needed for populating it and ensuring its operation. The queries were organized into two groups, oriented especially to two distinct database management systems: one relational (MySQL) and one non relational (Neo4J). The goal is to evaluate the energy consumption of different types of queries, and at the same time compare it in terms of relational and non-relational database approaches. This paper relates the process we implemented to set up the energy consumption application scenario, measure the energy consumption of each query, and present our first preliminary results
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