The third voice: Do enhanced e-books enhance the benefits of shared story reading with preschoolers?

This study from which this paper draws examined the benefits of reading plain e-books (with parental instruction) compared to enhanced e-books (with limited parental direction) with 3- to 5-year-old children. Interaction was measured through parent-child verbal communication and eye contact. Engagement was measured through time spent visually focused on the story, and retention was measured through open-ended story event recall questions and multiple-choice story vocabulary questions. There were no differences between the enhanced and plain e-book conditions in children’s qualitative engagement with the story, or in the amounts of vocabulary or story events they retained. While enhanced e-books resulted in more time spent gazing at the device, parents and children were significantly more interactive when reading plain e-books. These findings suggest that while both plain and enhanced e-books are effective in aiding children’s retention of words and story events, plain e-books read by a caregiver are better at promoting meaningful conversation

Hiding in Plain Sight: Identifying Computational Thinking in the Ontario Elementary School Curriculum

Given a growing digital economy with complex problems, demands are being made for education to address computational thinking (CT) – an approach to problem solving that draws on the tenets of computer science. We conducted a comprehensive content analysis of the Ontario elementary school curriculum documents for 44 CT-related terms to examine the extent to which CT may already be considered within the curriculum. The quantitative analysis strategy provided frequencies of terms, and a qualitative analysis provided information about how and where terms were being used. As predicted, results showed that while CT terms appeared mostly in Mathematics, and concepts and perspectives were more frequently cited than practices, related terms appeared across almost all disciplines and grades. Findings suggest that CT is already a relevant consideration for educators in terms of concepts and perspectives; however, CT practices should be more widely incorporated to promote 21st century skills across disciplines. Future research would benefit from continued examination of the implementation and assessment of CT and its related concepts, practices, and perspectives

A parallel grid-based implementation for real time processing of event log data in collaborative applications

Collaborative applications usually register user interaction in the form of semi-structured plain text event log data. Extracting and structuring of data is a prerequisite for later key processes such as the analysis of interactions, assessment of group activity, or the provision of awareness and feedback. Yet, in real situations of online collaborative activity, the processing of log data is usually done offline since structuring event log data is, in general, a computationally costly process and the amount of log data tends to be very large. Techniques to speed and scale up the structuring and processing of log data with minimal impact on the performance of the collaborative application are thus desirable to be able to process log data in real time. In this paper, we present a parallel grid-based implementation for processing in real time the event log data generated in collaborative applications. Our results show the feasibility of using grid middleware to speed and scale up the process of structuring and processing semi-structured event log data. The Grid prototype follows the Master-Worker (MW) paradigm. It is implemented using the Globus Toolkit (GT) and is tested on the Planetlab platform

Improved results for the mass spectrum of N=1 supersymmetric SU(3) Yang-Mills theory

This talk summarizes the results of the DESY-M\"unster collaboration for $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with the gauge group SU(3). It is an updated status report with respect to our preliminary data presented at the last conference. In order to control the lattice artefacts we have now considered a clover improved fermion action and different values of the gauge coupling.Comment: Presented at Lattice 2017, the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory at Granada, Spain (18-24 June 2017

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine

CS Circles: An In-Browser Python Course for Beginners

Computer Science Circles is a free programming website for beginners that is designed to be fun, easy to use, and accessible to the broadest possible audience. We teach Python since it is simple yet powerful, and the course content is well-structured but written in plain language. The website has over one hundred exercises in thirty lesson pages, plus special features to help teachers support their students. It is available in both English and French. We discuss the philosophy behind the course and its design, we describe how it was implemented, and we give statistics on its use.Comment: To appear in SIGCSE 201