Correcting Errors and Adding Features to PMKS

Planar Mechanism Kinematic Simulator (PMKS) is a web-based tool to generate the kinematics of linkages. The tool can also be used to generate joint forces and input torque in linkages with revolute joints. The team explored and formulated various additions to the tool. The additions involved implementing methods to detect singularities in four and six-bar linkages with revolute joints. The team also worked on generating interface concepts for displaying free body diagrams and simulator results to enhance student experience with the tool. Finally, aspects to the migration of the tool from the current Microsoft Silverlight platform to the Microsoft Windows Desktop were also investigated

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Link IDE : A Real Time Collaborative Development Environment

While working on large scale development projects all software engineers find themselves, at some point, working with a source control system in order to add or re-vert changes to code. With software projects involving a multitude of programmers this is a crucial part of successful development. When working on a smaller project howev-er, with a tight knit group, setting up and dealing with such a system can become more work than it is worth. To solve this problem a real time collaborative integrated devel-opment environment could be used. The IDE’s focus would be on providing a collabora-tive setting for programming teams or pair programming by taking advantage of real time text editing, the ability to build and run code, chat, and various other team and task oriented features. Instead of running into code conflicts at check-in time, users would be able to see conflicts appearing in real-time. This would allow small programming teams to bypass source control, avoid wasting time, and spend more time collaborating. Real time text editing has recently become popular with its appearance in Google Docs. There are a number of open source applications that support real time text editing. Real time editing by multiple users allows not only for excellent collaborative programming but can also be very effective in teaching sessions of programming. Other features such as chatting and task lists would also help to create a fully immersive and organized col-laborative environment where users do not need outside tools in order to collaborate

PMKS+: Recreating a Legacy Application

The goal of this project was to recreate the Planar Mechanism Kinematic Simulator (PMKS), a legacy, open-source web application, on a modern web platform with an enhanced user experience. The conversion included support for multiple browsers and improvements to the graphical user interface. A user interface is effective when it improves the overall experience of the user. This application was developed using the latest technologies in web development, such as HTML5 and Typescript, according to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium. Through multiple evaluations testing the interface and functions, we were able to create a similar application to PMKS that has an improved user interface experience

noteEd - A web-based lecture capture system

Electronic capture and playback of lectures has long been the aim of many academic projects. Synote is an application developed under MACFoB (Multimedia Annotation and Community Folksonomy Building) project to synchronise the playback of lecture materials. However, Synote provides no functionality to capture such multimedia. This project involves the creation of a system called noteEd, which will capture a range of multimedia from lectures and make them available to Synote. This report describes the evolution of the noteEd project throughout the design and implementation of the proposed system. The performance of the system was checked in a user acceptance test with the customer, which is discussed after screenshots of our solution. Finally, the project management is presented containing a final project evaluation

BeSocratic: An Intelligent Tutoring System for the Recognition, Evaluation, and Analysis of Free-form Student Input

This dissertation describes a novel intelligent tutoring system, BeSocratic, which aims to help fill the gap between simple multiple-choice systems and free-response systems. BeSocratic focuses on targeting questions that are free-form in nature yet defined to the point which allows for automatic evaluation and analysis. The system includes a set of modules which provide instructors with tools to assess student performance. Beyond text boxes and multiple-choice questions, BeSocratic contains several modules that recognize, evaluate, provide feedback, and analyze student-drawn structures, including Euclidean graphs, chemistry molecules, computer science graphs, and simple drawings. Our system uses a visual, rule-based authoring system which enables the creation of activities for use within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms. BeSocratic records each action that students make within the system. Using a set of post-analysis tools, teachers have the ability to examine both individual and group performances. We accomplish this using hidden Markov model-based clustering techniques and visualizations. These visualizations can help teachers quickly identify common strategies and errors for large groups of students. Furthermore, analysis results can be used directly to improve activities through advanced detection of student errors and refined feedback. BeSocratic activities have been created and tested at several universities. We report specific results from several activities, and discuss how BeSocratic\u27s analysis tools are being used with data from other systems. We specifically detail two chemistry activities and one computer science activity: (1) an activity focused on improving mechanism use, (2) an activity which assesses student understanding of Gibbs energy, and (3) an activity which teaches students the fundamentals of splay trees. In addition to analyzing data collected from students within BeSocratic, we share our visualizations and results from analyzing data gathered with another educational system, PhET

A profile of the future : what could HTML 5 do for HE by 2015?

HTML 5 is the most significant update of HTML in the last 10 years since XHTML was introduced. It promises a vastly improved user experience, increased browser features, cross compatibility and the ability to provide semantic content. In this paper we discuss the near future position for Higher Education in terms of technological transform, the proposed capabilities of HTML 5, and how they may change and how virtual learning environments are implemented in the future. We offer a set of education-based scenarios and how the emerging standard could benefit them. Finally we conclude with possible implementation timescales