Revisiting the Definition of a Virtual Manipulative

In 2002, Moyer, Bolyard and Spikell defined a virtual manipulative as an “an interactive, Web-based visual representation of a dynamic object that presents opportunities for constructing mathematical knowledge” (p. 373). The purpose of this chapter is to revisit, clarify and update the definition of a virtual manipulative. After clarifying what a virtual manipulative is and what it is not, we propose an updated definition for virtual manipulative: an interactive, technology-enabled visual representation of a dynamic mathematical object, including all of the programmable features that allow it to be manipulated, that presents opportunities for constructing mathematical knowledge. The chapter describes the characteristics of five of the most common virtual manipulative environments in use in education: single-representation, multi-representation, tutorial, gaming and simulation

A First Look at Android Applications in Google Play related to Covid-19

Due to the convenience of access-on-demand to information and business solutions, mobile apps have become an important asset in the digital world. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, app developers have joined the response effort in various ways by releasing apps that target different user bases (e.g., all citizens or journalists), offer different services (e.g., location tracking or diagnostic-aid), provide generic or specialized information, etc. While many apps have raised some concerns by spreading misinformation or even malware, the literature does not yet provide a clear landscape of the different apps that were developed. In this study, we focus on the Android ecosystem and investigate Covid-related Android apps. In a best-effort scenario, we attempt to systematically identify all relevant apps and study their characteristics with the objective to provide a First taxonomy of Covid-related apps, broadening the relevance beyond the implementation of contact tracing. Overall, our study yields a number of empirical insights that contribute to enlarge the knowledge on Covid-related apps: (1) Developer communities contributed rapidly to the Covid-19, with dedicated apps released as early as January 2020; (2) Covid-related apps deliver digital tools to users (e.g., health diaries), serve to broadcast information to users (e.g., spread statistics), and collect data from users (e.g., for tracing); (3) Covid-related apps are less complex than standard apps; (4) they generally do not seem to leak sensitive data; (5) in the majority of cases, Covid-related apps are released by entities with past experience on the market, mostly official government entities or public health organizations.Comment: Accepted in Empirical Software Engineering under reference: EMSE-D-20-00211R

Designing an architecture for secure sharing of personal health records : a case of developing countries

Includes bibliographical references.While there has been an increase in the design and development of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems in the developed world, little has been done to explore the utility of these systems in the developing world. Despite the usual problems of poor infrastructure, PHR systems designed for the developing world need to conform to users with different models of security and literacy than those designed for developed world. This study investigated a PHR system distributed across mobile devices with a security model and an interface that supports the usage and concerns of low literacy users in developing countries. The main question addressed in this study is: “Can personal health records be stored securely and usefully on mobile phones?” In this study, mobile phones were integrated into the PHR architecture that we/I designed because the literature reveals that the majority of the population in developing countries possess mobile phones. Additionally, mobile phones are very flexible and cost efficient devices that offer adequate storage and computing capabilities to users for typically communication operations. However, it is also worth noting that, mobile phones generally do not provide sufficient security mechanisms to protect the user data from unauthorized access

Play JBT – Mobile Application for the Tropical Botanical Garden of Lisbon

Trabalho de projecto de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020Com o progresso das tecnologias de informação e comunicação (TIC), as instituições culturais diversificaram as modalidades de interação com as pessoas. TIC permite hoje as várias instituições culturais de assumir papeis diferentes perante a comunidade (por exemplo, educação dos cidadãos e das suas associações; formador de várias competências; e de perito em vários programas governamentais para desenvolvimento de comunidades). Neste documento está apresentado o trabalho de desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel para Jardim Botânico Tropical de Lisboa. Técnicas diversas foram utilizadas no desenvolvimento de aplicação móvel (por exemplo, entrevistas, listagem de conteúdos, prototipagem, avaliação heurística, testes de usabilidade). São apresentados detalhes das tecnologias usadas (software e hardware), procedimentos de implementação, como também sobre arquitetura final do sistema desenvolvido. A aplicação móvel permite aos visitantes de Jardim Botânico Tropical interagir de formas diferentes com os componentes de jardim (plantas, aves e edifícios). Vários recursos educativos são incluídos na aplicação de modo a ser adaptados de modo automático ao perfil do utilizador. A aplicação permite também captar e armazenar os dados produzidos por utilizadores da aplicação de modo a serem utilizados para melhoria de experiência dos visitantes do jardim. Vários serviços Web foram incluídos para melhorar apresentação dos conteúdos e para melhorar os serviços do jardim. Foram também realizados testes com peritos no jardim e recolhido feedback dos utilizadores dos quais recebemos boas críticas e sugestões que foram integradas na aplicação. Foram também realizados um conjunto de testes de desempenho do servidor.Through the progress of information and communication technologies (ICT), cultural institutions have diversified the modalities of interacting with people. Today, ICTs allow various cultural institutions to take on different roles in the community (e.g. educating citizens and their associations; shaping various skills; supporting government programs for community development). This document introduces the process of development of a mobile application, which acts mainly as a helping guide for visitors of the Lisbon Tropical Botanical Garden. This mobile application allows these visitors to interact in different ways with garden components (plants, buildings and birds), as well as to have access to the several educational resources included in it, which are to be adapted to the user's profile. The application also allows them to capture and store the data produced, data which is also used for help with improving garden services. Web services have been developed to provide content and to centrally store data on the visitor’s trajectory in the garden and demographics. Furthermore, various techniques were used in the process of development (e.g. interviews, content listing, prototyping, heuristic evaluation, usability testing). Details on the technologies used (software and hardware), implementation procedures, as well as the final architecture of the developed system will be demonstrated. Finally, a set of usability tests is presented, from which we received positive feedback from the users as well as the performance tests executed on the server

Predicting App Intrusiveness Using LSTM Networks to Analyze App Descriptions

Mobile apps are at the center of everyone's daily lives and users give them access to their intimate personal data. Some apps collect more information than they need to perform their job. These apps are called intrusive, and can represent not only a privacy issue, but a security problem for their users. Therefore, it is important to develop methods for figuring out how much an app can detect and collect from its users, and whether that access is in line with their privacy expectations. Several methods have been devised to determine app intrusiveness, a measure that represents how much an app's data collection deviates from its basic needs. This number, called intrusiveness or privacy score, can guide a user in the process of identifying apps that gather too much personal information. Some of the methods to calculate intrusiveness include analysis of app descriptions and conformity with their programmed behavior. However, most of the existing approaches depend on static analysis that is quite challenging and mandates access to the binaries or source code. This thesis proposes a novel method to determine whether an app is intrusive based on its description, which can allow users to make decisions before downloading. More specifically, we used a Long Short-Term Memory (\ac{LSTM}) network to analyze the descriptions, along with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (\ac{MLP}) network to process metadata provided by other app features. The results show that this combined network structure achieved 79\% accuracy in training and 74\% accuracy for validation, with 840,000 samples and a 75/25 split between training and validation. Our findings indicate that not only it is possible to use the description and other information available from the app store to predict the intrusiveness of an app, but also that the network required to do the job is fairly small.Master of ScienceComputer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167243/1/Montenegro2021.pdfDescription of Montenegro2021.pdf : thesi

Gamification with the universal game heuristic to develop a mobile web game for learning Viena Karelian dialect and culture

Abstract. Learning Viena Karelian dialect and culture require an innovative approach to increase the willingness of learners to learn in a fun and an effective way. Karelian is an endangered language with only around 35,000 speakers, in contrast with 640,000 people who live in the Republic of Karelia. If the number of speakers slowly decrease every year and there are limited ways to learn, then those problems may lead this endangered language to be extinct in the future. Therefore, gamification approach was used to design and build an educational game from non-gaming contexts. In this research, a functional prototype was built to learn Viena Karelian dialect and culture, where the beginner learners, from English and Finnish speakers, can learn with desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices. Design science research was used as the research method and the universal game heuristic was used as the design cycle. A functional prototype that can be accessed by using web browsers was built with Laravel PHP framework and Bootstrap frontend framework. Learners can play the game and explore various features to learn Viena Karelian dialect and culture. Testing phase was conducted in the 3rd international GamiFIN conference with 38 players and 12 received feedback, and the result shown that the game motivated the test participants to play, with 91.7% positive engagement. The feedback is available for further improvement of Viena game development project and as a foundation to develop similar games for other Karelian dialects and culture