Investigating the Relationship Between Spatial Skills and Computer Science

The relationship between spatial skills training and computer science learning is unclear. Reported experiments provide tantalising, though not convincing, evidence that training a programming student's spatial skills may accelerate the development of their programming skills. Given the well-documented challenge of learning to program, such acceleration would be welcomed. Despite the experimental results, no attempt has been made to develop a model of how a linkage between spatial skills and computer science ability might operate, hampering the development of a sound research programme to investigate the issue further. This paper surveys the literature on spatial skills and investigates the various underlying cognitive skills involved. It poses a theoretical model for the relationship between computer science ability and spatial skills, exploring ways in which the cognitive processes involved in each overlap, and hence may influence one another. An experiment shows that spatial skills typically increase as the level of academic achievement in computer science increases. Overall, this work provides a substantial foundation for, and encouragement to develop, a major research programme investigating precisely how spatial skills training influences computer science learning, and hence whether computer science education could be significantly improved

Chairs' award: investigating the relationship between spatial skills and computer science

The relationship between spatial skills training and computer science learning is unclear. Reported experiments provide tantalising, though not convincing, evidence that training a programming student’s spatial skills may accelerate the development of their programming skills. Given the well-documented challenge of learning to program, such acceleration would be welcomed. Despite the experimental results, no attempt has been made to develop a model of how a linkage between spatial skills and computer science ability might operate, hampering the development of a sound research programme to investigate the issue further. This paper surveys the literature on spatial skills and investigates the various underlying cognitive skills involved. It poses a theoretical model for the relationship between computer science ability and spatial skills, exploring ways in which the cognitive processes involved in each overlap, and hence may influence one another. An experiment shows that spatial skills typically increase as the level of academic achievement in computer science increases. Overall, this work provides a substantial foundation for, and encouragement to develop, a major research programme investigating precisely how spatial skills training influences computer science learning, and hence whether computer science education could be significantly improved

A New Set of Three-Dimensional Shapes for Investigating Mental Rotation Processes: Validation Data and Stimulus Set

Mental rotation is one of the most influential paradigms in the history of cognitive psychology. In this paper, we present a new set of validated mental rotation stimuli to be used freely by the scientific community. Three-dimensional visual rendering software was employed to generate a total of 384 realistic-looking mental rotation stimuli with shading and foreshortening depth cues. Each stimulus was composed of two pictures: a baseline object and a target object, placed side by side, which can be aligned by means of a rotation around the vertical axis in half of the stimuli but not in the other half. Behavioral data (N=54, freely available) based on these stimuli exhibited the typical linear increase in response times and error rates with angular disparity, validating the stimulus set. This set of stimuli is especially useful for studies where it is necessary to avoid stimulus repetition, such as training studies

Comparing the cognitive profile of the HCI professional and the HCI educator

Previous research into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education has focussed mainly on the curriculum, pedagogy and the gap between education, and little is known about the cognitive profile of the HCI practitioner or educator, or how their individual differences impact upon practice in the field or the classroom. This research intends to address this gap by investigating the cognitive style of HCI practitioners, educators, and those with both roles. 315 professionals responded to a global online survey which captured their individual cognitive style using the Allinson and Hayes Cognitive Style Index (CSI) which tests whether the subject tends more towards an intuitivist or analyst, and the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (OSIVQ) which suggests a three dimensional model of cognitive style – object imagers who prefer to construct pictorial images, spatial imagers who prefer schematic representations and verbalizers who prefer to use verbal-analytical tools. Together, these two instruments provide a profile that matches the skills required to work within the field of HCI. The respondents included practitioners in the field (N=179), educators (N=61), and some who were both practitioner and educator (N=75). A one-way between-groups ANOVA and MANOVA was performed to investigate differences in the role of the professional, and the CSI and OSIVQ profiles respectively, followed by the Welch t-test to compare their OSIVQ scores with the published normative values. The ANOVA comparing the CSI scores for each of the groups revealed a statistically significant difference of F(2, 312) = 3.35, p= 0.38 and post-hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the mean score for the educators was significantly different from that of the ‘both’ group. The practitioners did not differ significantly from either the educators or ‘both’. This may in some part be explained by the fact that very often HCI is taught by an academic with a computer science background rather than an HCI specialist, but further investigation is needed in this area. The MANOVA used the three constructs of the OSIVQ as dependent variables. No significant difference was found between the groups. However, the t-tests comparing the professional against the normative data revealed that whilst there was no significant difference between the object imager score of the HCI professional and the scientist, there was a difference between the spatial imager score of the HCI professional and the visual artist, perhaps again reflecting the computer science background of many professionals. 24 survey respondents have been interviewed and the resulting data will form the basis of a thematic analysis to extend the cognitive profile, and to identify the predominant technological frames of operation. Applying this concept of technological frames to the domain of HCI, will help to make sense of the adoption and application of knowledge, tools and techniques amongst this community. In order for the curriculum to meet the needs of the market, the educator needs to understand the practitioner in order to produce graduates equipped for the role. Finally, as HCI is delivered in a multidisciplinary environment, should it not also be taught by a multidisciplinary team

Would Motor-Imagery based BCI user training benefit from more women experimenters?

Mental Imagery based Brain-Computer Interfaces (MI-BCI) are a mean to control digital technologies by performing MI tasks alone. Throughout MI-BCI use, human supervision (e.g., experimenter or caregiver) plays a central role. While providing emotional and social feedback, people present BCIs to users and ensure smooth users' progress with BCI use. Though, very little is known about the influence experimenters might have on the results obtained. Such influence is to be expected as social and emotional feedback were shown to influence MI-BCI performances. Furthermore, literature from different fields showed an experimenter effect, and specifically of their gender, on experimental outcome. We assessed the impact of the interaction between experi-menter and participant gender on MI-BCI performances and progress throughout a session. Our results revealed an interaction between participants gender, experimenter gender and progress over runs. It seems to suggest that women experimenters may positively influence partici-pants' progress compared to men experimenters

Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

Penerapan nilai-nilaimurnidalam kalangan pelajar Sarjana muda pendidikan teknik dan vokasional semasa Menjalankan amali di makmal

Nilai murni ialah nilai yang menjadi asas kepada pembentukan akhlak dan amat penting untuk diserapkan kepada setiap individu khususnya kepada golongan pelajar. Namun demikian menurut kajian-kajian lepas, nilai murni masih kurang diterapkan dengan memuaskan dalam kalangan pelajar terutamanya semasa menjalankan keija amali di makmal. Oleh yang demikian kajian ini dijalankan bagi mengenal pasti sejauh mana pelajar dan pensyarah menerapkan nilai-nilai murni semasa proses pengajaran dan pembelajaran di makmal. Seramai 226 orang pelajar Saijana Muda Pendidikan Teknik dan Vokasional (PTV) menjadi responden dalam kajian ini. Soal selidik merupakan instrumen utama dalam kajian ini di samping temu bual dan pemerhatian sebagai instrumen sokongan. Data-data dikumpulkan dan dianalisis menggunakan perisian SPSS Versi 12.0 bagi mendapatkan min, sisihan piawai dan inferensi ANOVA manakala analisis kandungan bagi data temu bual dan pemerhatian. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan pelajar menerapkan kesemua nilai murni yang terlibat dalam kajian ini. Walau bagaimanapun didapati hanya sebahagian sahaja pensyarah menerapkan nilai-nilai murni kepada pelajar semasa proses pengajaran dan pembelajaran di makmal. Oleh yang demikian, pengkaji mengemukakan beberapa cadangan untuk memastikan pensyarah dan pelajar menerapkan nilai-nilai murni antaranya ialah pihak Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) perlu membuat penyeliaan dari masa ke semasa bagi memastikan pensyarah dan pelajar bersama-sama menerapkan nilai-nilai murni semasa proses pengajaran dan pembelajaran di makmal

A Multi-disciplinary Approach to the Investigation of Aspects of Serial Order in Cognition

Serial order processing or Sequence processing underlies many human activities such as speech, language, skill learning, planning, problem solving, etc. Investigating the\ud neural bases of sequence processing enables us to understand serial order in cognition and helps us building intelligent devices. In the current paper, various\ud cognitive issues related to sequence processing will be discussed with examples. Some of the issues are: distributed versus local representation, pre-wired versus\ud adaptive origins of representation, implicit versus explicit learning, fixed/flat versus hierarchical organization, timing aspects, order information embedded in sequences, primacy versus recency in list learning and aspects of sequence perception such as recognition, recall and generation. Experimental results that give evidence for the involvement of various brain areas will be described. Finally, theoretical frameworks based on Markov models and Reinforcement Learning paradigm will be presented. These theoretical ideas are useful for studying sequential phenomena in a principled way

A Data Science Course for Undergraduates: Thinking with Data

Data science is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines elements of mathematics, statistics, computer science, and knowledge in a particular application domain for the purpose of extracting meaningful information from the increasingly sophisticated array of data available in many settings. These data tend to be non-traditional, in the sense that they are often live, large, complex, and/or messy. A first course in statistics at the undergraduate level typically introduces students with a variety of techniques to analyze small, neat, and clean data sets. However, whether they pursue more formal training in statistics or not, many of these students will end up working with data that is considerably more complex, and will need facility with statistical computing techniques. More importantly, these students require a framework for thinking structurally about data. We describe an undergraduate course in a liberal arts environment that provides students with the tools necessary to apply data science. The course emphasizes modern, practical, and useful skills that cover the full data analysis spectrum, from asking an interesting question to acquiring, managing, manipulating, processing, querying, analyzing, and visualizing data, as well communicating findings in written, graphical, and oral forms.Comment: 21 pages total including supplementary material