Using the Internet of Things to Teach Good Software Engineering Practice to High School Students

This paper describes a course to introduce high school students to software engineering in practice using the Internet Of Things (IoT). IoT devices allow students to get quick, visible results without watering down technical aspects of programming and networking. The course has three broad goals: (1) to make software engineering fun and applicable, with the aim of recruiting traditionally underrepresented groups into computing; (2) to make young students begin to approach problems with a design mindset; and (3) to show students that computer science, generally, and software engineering, specifically, is about much more than programming. The course unfolds in three segments. The first is a whirlwind introduction to a subset of IoT technologies. Students complete a specific task (or set of tasks) using each technology. This segment culminates in a “do-it-yourself” project, in which the students implement a simple IoT application using their basic knowledge of the technologies. The course’s second segment introduces software engineering practices, again primarily via hands-on practical tutorials. In the third segment of the course, the students conceive of, design, and implement a project that uses the technologies introduced in the first segment, all while being attentive to the good software engineering practices acquired in the second segment. In addition to presenting the course curriculum, the paper also discusses a first offering of the course in a threeweek summer intensive program in 2017, including assessments done to evaluate the curriculum.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Teaching Concurrent Software Design: A Case Study Using Android

In this article, we explore various parallel and distributed computing topics from a user-centric software engineering perspective. Specifically, in the context of mobile application development, we study the basic building blocks of interactive applications in the form of events, timers, and asynchronous activities, along with related software modeling, architecture, and design topics.Comment: Submitted to CDER NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing - Core Topics for Undergraduate

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund

MOSDEN: An Internet of Things Middleware for Resource Constrained Mobile Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of Future Internet and will comprise many billions of Internet Connected Objects (ICO) or `things' where things can sense, communicate, compute and potentially actuate as well as have intelligence, multi-modal interfaces, physical/ virtual identities and attributes. Collecting data from these objects is an important task as it allows software systems to understand the environment better. Many different hardware devices may involve in the process of collecting and uploading sensor data to the cloud where complex processing can occur. Further, we cannot expect all these objects to be connected to the computers due to technical and economical reasons. Therefore, we should be able to utilize resource constrained devices to collect data from these ICOs. On the other hand, it is critical to process the collected sensor data before sending them to the cloud to make sure the sustainability of the infrastructure due to energy constraints. This requires to move the sensor data processing tasks towards the resource constrained computational devices (e.g. mobile phones). In this paper, we propose Mobile Sensor Data Processing Engine (MOSDEN), an plug-in-based IoT middleware for mobile devices, that allows to collect and process sensor data without programming efforts. Our architecture also supports sensing as a service model. We present the results of the evaluations that demonstrate its suitability towards real world deployments. Our proposed middleware is built on Android platform

Android Educational Game: Introduction to Basic Logic for Children

Introduction to Basic Logic aims to develop children\u27s thinking abilities about numbers and quantities to teach activities that are in accordance with the development of their thinking power. Learning in children requires an educational media game facility, one of which is the Educational Game. This educational type game aims to provoke children\u27s interest in learning the subject matter while playing the game. Mobile games can be an alternative in children\u27s learning. Basically children prefer to play rather than learn. This is natural, because child psychology is playing. Based on these problems an educational game application is made for the introduction of basic logic in Android-based children, so that it can produce alternative learning for children. This educational game is intended for children aged 6-7 years because children aged 6-7 years have begun to understand the concept of numbers and develop sensitivity in solving a problem. And trials are carried out using a questionnair

Mobile learning: benefits of augmented reality in geometry teaching

As a consequence of the technological advances and the widespread use of mobile devices to access information and communication in the last decades, mobile learning has become a spontaneous learning model, providing a more flexible and collaborative technology-based learning. Thus, mobile technologies can create new opportunities for enhancing the pupils’ learning experiences. This paper presents the development of a game to assist teaching and learning, aiming to help students acquire knowledge in the field of geometry. The game was intended to develop the following competences in primary school learners (8-10 years): a better visualization of geometric objects on a plane and in space; understanding of the properties of geometric solids; and familiarization with the vocabulary of geometry. Findings show that by using the game, students have improved around 35% the hits of correct responses to the classification and differentiation between edge, vertex and face in 3D solids.This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Design Star CDT (AH/L503770/1), the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) projects LARSyS (UID/EEA/50009/2013) and CIAC-Research Centre for Arts and Communication.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A review into the factors affecting declines in undergraduate Computer Science enrolments and approaches for solving this problem

There has been a noticeable drop in enrolments in Computer Science (CS) courses and interest in CS careers in recent years while demand for CS skills is increasing dramatically. Not only are such skills useful for CS jobs but for all forms of business and to some extent personal lives as Information Technology (IT) is becoming ubiquitous and essential for most aspects of modern life. Therefore it is essential to address this lack of interest and skills to not only fill the demand for CS employees but to provide students with the CS skills they need for modern life especially for improving their employability and skills for further study. This report looks at possible reasons for the lack of interest in CS and different approaches used to enhance CS education and improve the appeal of CS