Overcoming Roadblocks in Introducing Virtual World Technology to High Schools

The EAST (Environmental And Spatial Technology) Initiative is a non-profit educational organization that provides students in over two hundred schools in eight states with access to advanced computing technologies for the purpose of enabling students to develop technical skills early and to produce solutions to local community problems. Although many high-end technologies are available through EAST, they are desktop solutions that individual students use and there are none that enable students within a school or between schools to collaborate. This thesis is a saga that documents the identification and removal of many roadblocks to introducing a 3D multi-user virtual simulation platform known as OpenSimulator into an EAST high school, Greenland High, located in Northwest Arkansas. The end result seemed compelling, simple and achievable -- with OpenSimulator, students from one or many EAST Labs would be able connect, chat, and work together within the same or nearby virtual areas to build models of (parts and aspects of) their communities. But getting to the point where students can begin to use this platform involved solving cost, safety, firewall, administrative, sustainability, and other puzzles. Most of this thesis is concerned with solving problems up to introducing OpenSimulator to Greenland -- more work is needed in understanding whether and how this kind of technology will benefit high school computing programs like EAST

How to familiarise pupils with the logic of algorithm

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit möglichen Wegen für Pädagogen, welche Kindern Algorithmen und Programmierung auf einfache und verständliche Art näher bringen wollen. Aus Gesprächen mit Schülern geht immer wieder hervor, dass die Programmierfächer eher sehr gefürchtet und unbeliebt sind, was sicher an der Thematik an sich, aber auch an der didaktischen Vermittlung der Lehrinhalte durch die Lehrer liegen mag. In dieser Arbeit wurde versucht mehrere Ansätze und Lerntheorien in Betracht zu ziehen, so dass es für den Leser/die Leserin offensichtlich wird, dass verschiedenste Methoden zum Ziel führen können und es nicht einen – den einzig richtigen Weg - geben kann. Dies würden schon alleine die verschiedenen Lerntypen, welche auch in der Arbeit beschrieben sind, unmöglich machen. Um zu verstehen wie Algorithmen den Schülern beigebracht werden können, ist es von großer Wichtigkeit sich bewusst zu machen, wo Kinder mit diesen konfrontiert werden und wie sie mit diesen umgehen. Oft ist es nur ein Bewusst machen, dass alle unsere täglichen Handlungen einem algorithmischen Ablauf folgen. Diese Arbeit spannt einen Bogen – beginnend mit grundlegenden Definitionen der Pädagogik, Didaktik, des Faches Informatik und der des Algorithmus – aufbauend auf pädagogische und didaktische Grundlagen des Lernenden/Lehrenden über den IST Zustand der Informatik in österreichischen Schulen, den Einsatz des Computers in der Schule bis zu dem Hauptthema des Algorithmus (Logik, Einsatz, Methoden der Vermittlung) und schließt mit dem Prinzip des spielerischen Programmierens plus Beispielen dafür ab. Mit dem Vorstellen von einer einfachen, aber effektiven Programmierumgebung (Scratch) ist die These dieser Arbeit bewiesen. Die These lautet: Unter Anwendung der richtigen didaktischen Methoden mit Berücksichtigung verschiedenster pädagogischer Ansätze und der Verwendung der richtigen Programmierumgebungen, können die Schüler das Programmieren leichter erlernen.The on hand thesis deals with possible ways for pedagogues to give pupils an understanding of programming and algorithms in a simple and understandable way. Discussions with students often show that computing lesions where they are taught programming languages are dreaded and unpopular, which might evolve from the subject matter, as well as from the didactical method teachers are using. In this thesis it was tried to show different approaches and learning theories so that it is obvious for the reader that many different methods can lead to the destination and that there is not existing a single unique way. To understand how algorithms can be taught to pupils it is of prime importance that teachers are aware where pupils are confronted with them and how they handle these situations. Often it is just a question of awareness that all our daily acts are following an algorithmic order. This thesis covers much ground – starting from elementary definitions of pedagogies, didactic, computing and the topic of algorithms – building on pedagogical and didactical principles of the learner and the teacher, continuing talking about the actual situation of computing in Austria’s schools – the usage of computers in school up to the main topic algorithm (logic, usage, methods of teaching) and ends with the principal of hands on programming with some examples. With the introductions of a simple but effective programming environment (Scratch), the thesis of this work is proofed. The thesis is: By using the right didactical methods considering different pedagogical approaches and offering pupils the right tools, they can get into computer programming more easily

Instrument Remote Control Application Framework

The Instrument Remote Control (IRC) architecture is a flexible, platform-independent application framework that is well suited for the control and monitoring of remote devices and sensors. IRC enables significant savings in development costs by utilizing extensible Markup Language (XML) descriptions to configure the framework for a specific application. The Instrument Markup Language (IML) is used to describe the commands used by an instrument, the data streams produced, the rules for formatting commands and parsing the data, and the method of communication. Often no custom code is needed to communicate with a new instrument or device. An IRC instance can advertise and publish a description about a device or subscribe to another device's description on a network. This simple capability of dynamically publishing and subscribing to interfaces enables a very flexible, self-adapting architecture for monitoring and control of complex instruments in diverse environments

A Decade of Code Comment Quality Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review

Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in code comments just as it matters in source code, assessing comment quality in practice is still an open problem. First and foremost, there is no unique definition of quality when it comes to evaluating code comments. The few existing studies on this topic rather focus on specific attributes of quality that can be easily quantified and measured. Existing techniques and corresponding tools may also focus on comments bound to a specific programming language, and may only deal with comments with specific scopes and clear goals (e.g., Javadoc comments at the method level, or in-body comments describing TODOs to be addressed). In this paper, we present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the last decade of research in SE to answer the following research questions: (i) What types of comments do researchers focus on when assessing comment quality? (ii) What quality attributes (QAs) do they consider? (iii) Which tools and techniques do they use to assess comment quality?, and (iv) How do they evaluate their studies on comment quality assessment in general? Our evaluation, based on the analysis of 2353 papers and the actual review of 47 relevant ones, shows that (i) most studies and techniques focus on comments in Java code, thus may not be generalizable to other languages, and (ii) the analyzed studies focus on four main QAs of a total of 21 QAs identified in the literature, with a clear predominance of checking consistency between comments and the code. We observe that researchers rely on manual assessment and specific heuristics rather than the automated assessment of the comment quality attributes

The deficiencies in the Apple iOS SDK with the example of third party frameworks usage

iOS SDK on Apple’i iOS operatsioonisüsteemile mõeldud rakenduste programmeerimisel kasutatav tarkvaraarenduskomplekt. Käesoleva magistritöö eesmärk on leida iOS SDK silmatorkaimavad puudujäägid. Selle tulemuse saavutamiseks tuleb kõigepealt leida iOS-i programmeerijate poolt kõige enimkasutatavad kolmanda osapoole vabavaralised teegid ja analüüsida nende populaarsuse põhjuseid. Esimene samm selliste raamistike leidmiseks on vaadata võõrustusdomeeni GitHubi kõige laialtrakendatavaid tarkvaraprojekte. Järgnev samm näeks ette iOS-i arendajate seas küsitluse läbiviimist, mille päringud põhineks eelmisel etapil saadud teadmistel. Viimase osana tuleks saadud tulemusi sügavamalt analüüsida ja neist järeldusi teha.The objective of this thesis is to find weak spots in the iOS SDK, a programming library used to develop applications for the iOS operating system running on Apple’s mobile devices. The method to finding these deficiencies is to first index the most frequently used third party frameworks used by iOS developers and analyze the reasons for their popularity. The first step to achieve this will be looking at the most liked frameworks in the GitHub hosting service. The second step will conduct a survey among iOS programmers with questions regarding these very same frameworks. The results will then be analyzed and summarized

Proceedings of the 19th Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of applications software. The goals of the SEL are: (1) to understand the software development process in the GSFC environment; (2) to measure the effects of various methodologies, tools, and models on this process; and (3) to identify and then to apply successful development practices. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that include this document

Services in pervasive computing environments : from design to delivery

The work presented in this thesis is based on the assumption that modern computer technologies are already potentially pervasive: CPUs are embedded in any sort of device; RAM and storage memory of a modern PDA is comparable to those of a ten years ago Unix workstation; Wi-Fi, GPRS, UMTS are leveraging the development of the wireless Internet. Nevertheless, computing is not pervasive because we do not have a clear conceptual model of the pervasive computer and we have not tools, methodologies, and middleware to write and to seamlessly deliver at once services over a multitude of heterogeneous devices and different delivery contexts. Our thesis addresses these issues starting from the analysis of forces in a pervasive computing environment: user mobility, user profile, user position, and device profile. The conceptual model, or metaphor, we use to drive our work is to consider the environment as surrounded by a multitude of services and objects and devices as the communicating gates between the real world and the virtual dimension of pervasive computing around us. Our thesis is thus built upon three main “pillars”. The first pillar is a domain-object-driven methodology which allows developer to abstract from low level details of the final delivery platform, and provides the user with the ability to access services in a multi-channel way. The rationale is that domain objects are self-contained pieces of software able to represent data and to compute functions and procedures. Our approach fills the gap between users and domain objects building an appropriate user interface which is both adapted to the domain object and to the end user device. As example, we present how to design, implement and deliver an electronic mail application over various platforms. The second pillar of this thesis analyzes in more details the forces that make direct object manipulation inadequate in a pervasive context. These forces are the user profile, the device profile, the context of use, and the combinatorial explosion of domain objects. From the analysis of the electronic mail application presented as example, we notice that according to the end user device, or according to particular circumstances during the access to the service (for instance if the user access the service by the interactive TV while he is having his breakfast) some functionalities are not compulsory and do not fit an adequate task sequence. So we decided to make task models explicit in the design of a service and to integrate the capability to automatically generate user interfaces for domain objects with the formal definition of task models adapted to the final delivery context. Finally, the third pillar of our thesis is about the lifecycle of services in a pervasive computing environment. Our solutions are based upon an existing framework, the Jini connection technology, and enrich this framework with new services and architectures for the deployment and discovery of services, for the user session management, and for the management of offline agents