A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Group project work from the outset: an in-depth teaching experience report

This article is an extended version of a paper that was submitted to 24th IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, Honolulu, May 2011CONTEXT - we redesigned our undergraduate computing programmes to address problems of motivation and outdated content. METHOD - the primary vehicle for the new curriculum was the group project which formed a central spine for the entire degree right from the first year. RESULTS - so far this programme has been successfully run once. Failures, drop outs and students required to retake modules have been halved (from an average of 21.6% from the previous 4 years to 9.5%) and students obtaining the top two grades have increased from 25.2% to 38.9%. CONCLUSIONS - whilst we cannot be certain that all improvement is due to the group projects informally the change has been well received, however, we are looking for areas to improve including the possibility of more structured support for student metacognitive awareness

A learning experience toward the understanding of abstraction-level interactions in parallel applications

In the curriculum of a Computer Engineering program, concepts like parallelism, concurrency, consistency, or atomicity are usually addressed in separate courses due to their thoroughness and extension. Isolating such concepts in courses helps students not only to focus on specific aspects, but also to experience the reality of working with modern computer systems, where those concepts are often detached in different abstraction levels. However, due to such an isolation, it exists a risk of inducing to the students an absence of interactions between these concepts, and, by extension, between the different abstraction levels of a system. This paper proposes a learning experience showcasing the interactions between abstraction levels addressed in laboratory sessions of different courses. The driving example is a parallel ray tracer. In the different courses, students implement and assemble components of this application from the algorithmic level of the tracer to the assembly instructions required to guarantee atomicity. Each lab focuses on a single abstraction level, but shows students the interactions with the rest of the levels. Technical results and student learning outcomes through the analysis of surveys validate the proposed experience and confirm the students learning improvement with a more integrated view of the system

iSTEM Teaching & Learning Conference Program 2017

iSTEM Conference Program 201

The lessons learnt from Willy Wonka (includes alternate ending)

Despite all that research has taught us, lectures and seminars still continue to be largely delivered in the classroom, with students sat in rows for far too long. Lecturers offer information, which some students choose to absorb. Some students choose not to, or don’t have the nature to be able to. So, what if we change this? What happens? And even more crucially, what can we do to use the ‘student voice’ to enhance how they learn and what they learn? Following a successful pilot in Experiential Education which we presented at the LJMU conference in 2013 we made developments which allow students to shape their own learning experience - truly engaging them in delivery. With Nick changing institutions at the beginning of this academic year we have both continued to explore Experiential Educational but in different ways. This presentation examines these developments and looks at three key areas: 1) The needs of students (which they weren’t shy in making clear to us!) and the differing learning styles they have, to see how teachers can use them to deliver an all-encompassing experience which is interactive, engaging and informative. 2) A taster of the technologies involved in flipped classrooms and the benefits of experiential education. 3) The reflective nature of learning journals to encourage the student voice to be raised (and then heard). Charlie got the Golden Ticket because he dreamt about it, because he did everything he could to get it. So, where did the others go wrong? And what could Wonka have done about this

A model-driven approach to teaching concurrency

We present an undergraduate course on concurrent programming where formal models are used in different stages of the learning process. The main practical difference with other approaches lies in the fact that the ability to develop correct concurrent software relies on a systematic transformation of formal models of inter-process interaction (so called shared resources), rather than on the specific constructs of some programming language. Using a resource-centric rather than a language-centric approach has some benefits for both teachers and students. Besides the obvious advantage of being independent of the programming language, the models help in the early validation of concurrent software design, provide students and teachers with a lingua franca that greatly simplifies communication at the classroom and during supervision, and help in the automatic generation of tests for the practical assignments. This method has been in use, with slight variations, for some 15 years, surviving changes in the programming language and course length. In this article, we describe the components and structure of the current incarnation of the course?which uses Java as target language?and some tools used to support our method. We provide a detailed description of the different outcomes that the model-driven approach delivers (validation of the initial design, automatic generation of tests, and mechanical generation of code) from a teaching perspective. A critical discussion on the perceived advantages and risks of our approach follows, including some proposals on how these risks can be minimized. We include a statistical analysis to show that our method has a positive impact in the student ability to understand concurrency and to generate correct code

Interdisciplinary STEM Teaching & Learning Conference Program [2016]

Conference Program for the 2016 Interdisciplinary STEM Teashing & Learning Conferenc

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The AutoProof Verifier: Usability by Non-Experts and on Standard Code

Formal verification tools are often developed by experts for experts; as a result, their usability by programmers with little formal methods experience may be severely limited. In this paper, we discuss this general phenomenon with reference to AutoProof: a tool that can verify the full functional correctness of object-oriented software. In particular, we present our experiences of using AutoProof in two contrasting contexts representative of non-expert usage. First, we discuss its usability by students in a graduate course on software verification, who were tasked with verifying implementations of various sorting algorithms. Second, we evaluate its usability in verifying code developed for programming assignments of an undergraduate course. The first scenario represents usability by serious non-experts; the second represents usability on "standard code", developed without full functional verification in mind. We report our experiences and lessons learnt, from which we derive some general suggestions for furthering the development of verification tools with respect to improving their usability.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Teaching Technology Fellowship Report on “Demonstration/Measurement System for Wireless Networks”

This paper is the final report for a Teaching Technology Fellowship project conducted between July 2005 and May 2007. This project involved integrating a wireless network measurement experiment into the curriculum of CS4514, Computer Networks, during the WPI B06 undergraduate term. After presenting goals and objectives, the chronology of preparation and execution of the project plan are discussed. The paper assesses the results of the B06 wireless measurement experience against a B05 offering of Computer Networks that included a wireless design assignment. A discussion of observations about the positive and negative aspects of this experimental pedagogical effort is provided as a summary