Proceedings of the Second Program Visualization Workshop, 2002

The Program Visualization Workshops aim to bring together researchers who design and construct program visualizations and, above all, educators who use and evaluate visualizations in their teaching. The first workshop took place in July 2000 at Porvoo, Finland. The second workshop was held in cooperation with ACM SIGCSE and took place at HornstrupCentret, Denmark in June 2002, immediately following the ITiCSE 2002 Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

Student’s Perception on Culture-Oriented e-Learning System: An Empirical Study

Electronic learning (e-learning) platform is fast growing in the Africa educational system and many students are busy enrolling and accepting it as a means for educational advancement and career achievement channel. An e-learning platform handles students across different cultural settings with various perceptions, learning needs and expectations. Nonetheless, incorporating cultural differences, expectations and perceptions as well as managing them, is challenging on the side of e-learning developers. The challenging aspect of the cultural management of e-learning can be attributed to the software crisis which has lasted for decades now with little or no solution to it. This study tries to understand and determine the perception of students on the development of a culture-oriented e-learning system that can allow them to be able to customise it to suit desired features in their home language at all times. The study also determines the factors and components that necessitate the implementation of the culture-oriented e-learning system. This study was carried out using quantitative research method among the students of North-West University, South Africa with a total number of 728 questionnaires collected and analysed. The perception of the involved students was mixed in the sense that some of them preferred to use English language as a medium of learning in e-learning while others would like the e-learning system platform to be designed and developed between their home language and English language. Again, their challenges range from lack of engagement to the inflexible e-learning system leading to the discovering of factors that facilitate culture-oriented e-learning system

Exploring student perceptions about the use of visual programming environments, their relation to student learning styles and their impact on student motivation in undergraduate introductory programming modules

My research aims to explore how students perceive the usability and enjoyment of visual/block-based programming environments (VPEs), to what extent their learning styles relate to these perceptions and finally to what extent these tools facilitate student understanding of basic programming constructs and impact their motivation to learn programming

Decision Support Systems: Issues and Challenges; Proceedings of an International Task Force Meeting, June 23-25, 1980

This book reports on a three-day meeting on Decision Support Systems held at IIASA. IIASA's interest in sponsoring the meeting was spurred by several factors. First, the term DSS clearly is used in a wide range of contexts; we hoped to develop a deeper understanding of the term and the new field to which it refers. Second, we felt that ongoing work in the DSS field would be enhanced by interaction between professionals who had been working on such systems and people from fields that function as "resource disciplines" for DSS. Finally we wished to bring professionals from several nations together, from the east as well as the west, to share experiences and to assess the viability of the DSS concept in different cultures. The broad objectives set for this meeting were realized in a number of ways. Virtually all the participants testified that they had gained a deeper understanding of DSS, the role it can play in asssisting managers in organizations, and the need for further development in key areas

Total animation: A multimedia computer resource program for secondary art education

This HyperStudio animation project covers the basic concepts, techniques, and procedures in producing animation. The purpose of this program is to furnish the user with enough information that will serve as a basic foundation to produce a simple animation for themselves

Reconfigurable middleware architectures for large scale sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks, in an effort to be energy efficient, typically lack the high-level abstractions of advanced programming languages. Though strong, the dichotomy between these two paradigms can be overcome. The SENSIX software framework, described in this dissertation, uniquely integrates constraint-dominated wireless sensor networks with the flexibility of object-oriented programming models, without violating the principles of either. Though these two computing paradigms are contradictory in many ways, SENSIX bridges them to yield a dynamic middleware abstraction unifying low-level resource-aware task reconfiguration and high-level object recomposition. Through the layered approach of SENSIX, the software developer creates a domain-specific sensing architecture by defining a customized task specification and utilizing object inheritance. In addition, SENSIX performs better at large scales (on the order of 1000 nodes or more) than other sensor network middleware which do not include such unified facilities for vertical integration

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments