A Review and Analysis of Process at the Nexus of Instructional and Software Design

This dissertation includes a literature review and a single case analysis at the nexus of instructional design and technology and software development. The purpose of this study is to explore the depth and breadth of educational software design and development processes, and educational software reuse, with the intent of uncovering barriers to software development, software re-use and software replication in educational contexts. First, a thorough review of the academic literature was conducted on a representative sampling of educational technology studies. An examination of a 15-year time period within four representative journals identified 72 studies that addressed educational software to some extent. An additional sampling of the initial results identified 50 of those studies that discussed software the development process. These were further analyzed for evidence of software re-use and replication. Review results found a lack of reusable and/or replication-focused reports of instructional software development in educational technology journals, but found some reporting of educational technology reuse and replication from articles outside of educational technology. Based on the analysis, possible reasons for this occurrence are discussed. The author then proposes how a model for conducting and presenting instructional software design and development research based on the constructs of design-based research and cultural-historical activity theory might help mitigate this gap. Finally, the author presents a qualitative analysis of the software development process within a large, design-based educational technology project using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a lens. Using CHAT, the author seeks to uncover contradictions between the working worlds of instructional design and technology and software development with the intent of demonstrating how to mitigate tensions between these systems, and ultimately to increase the likelihood of reusable/replicable educational technologies. Findings reveal myriad tensions and social contradictions centered around the translation of instructional goals and requirements into software design and development tasks. Based on these results, the researcher proposes an educational software development framework called the iterative and integrative instructional software design framework that may help alleviate these tensions and thus make educational software design and development more productive, transparent, and replicable

Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool

We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a first-person viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.Comment: Accepted for publication in 2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017); Supplementary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUiy1M9hUK

Assessment of parametric assembly models based on CAD quality dimensions

[EN] An approach to convey CAD quality-oriented strategies to beginning users to create bottom-up assemblies is described. The work builds on previous efforts in the area of single part history-based, feature-based parametric modeling evaluation by defining, testing, and validating a set of quality dimensions that can be applied to MCAD assembly assessment. The process of redefining and adapting dimension descriptors and achievement levels of parts rubrics to make them applicable to assemblies is addressed, then the results of two experimental studies designed to analyze the inter-rater reliability of this approach to assembly evaluation are reported. Results suggest the mechanism is reliable to provide an objective assessment of assembly models. Limitations for the formative selfevaluation of CAD assembly skills are also identified.This work was partially supported by the Spanish grant DPI2017-84526-R (MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE), project CAL-MBE, Implementation and validation of a theoretical CAD quality model in a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) context. , and the ANNOTA2 project funded by Universitat Politècnica de València.Otey, J.; Company, P.; Contero, M.; Camba, JD. (2019). Assessment of parametric assembly models based on CAD quality dimensions. Computer-Aided Design and Applications. 16(4):628-653. https://doi.org/10.14733/cadaps.2019.628-653S62865316

Dimensions of Science Learning: a study on PISA test questions involving chemistry content

In this article we discuss the potential of certain questions from PISA to engage students in specific scientific dimensions. The guiding question for the research is: What Dimensions of Scientific Learning, described in the NRC (2012), can be identified in questions that address the chemical contents of the PISA Science test? Thus, we analyze the questions seeking to identify the Scientific Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Disciplinary Central Ideas. The research is predominantly qualitative and the analysis of the data was based on the procedures of content analysis. A total of 59 questions were analyzed with the aid of the Atlas software. From the analysis, some clusters were attempted to configure such dimensions. The following results are highlighted: the most identified scientific practices in the analyzed questions were analyzing and interpreting data (SP4) and constructing explanations (SP6). The most identified crosscutting concept was: cause and effect - mechanism and prediction (CC2). And as for the third dimension – disciplinary core ideas - we highlight the higher incidence of the physical sciences (DCI1) that deals with topics envolving matter and its interactions. We highlight the potential of PISA items to involve students in specific scientific dimensions; in addition, we consider that this study brings contributions to teachers in the scientific areas, since recognizing the dimensions can guide their actions in the classroom, aiming at teaching that favors scientific literacy

An Optimization-Based Artificial Intelligence Framework for Teaching English at College Level Under Tribhuvan University

Learning and computing breakthroughs among students are beginning to converge due to the rapid growth of digital technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made an impact on the way we teach English at college level. It has an enormous potential of providing digitalized and completely personalized learning to each English language teacher. This quantitative quasi-experimental research offers a strategy for incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in English language teaching at college level. The participants consisted of 100 bachelor level students studying at a constituent college of Tribhuvan University, Nepal. The participants were selected using simple random sampling and divided into two groups: the study group and the control group. The researcher employed questionnaire and test as the instruments to collect the data. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS 2.0 which is a tool for analyzing quantitatively challenging data. The findings were presented descriptively and the researcher assessed the model's criteria, designed a comparison test, and conducted a survey questionnaire to check the reliability and effectiveness of the prediction. The evidence shows that Enhanced Whale Hyper-Tuned Artificial Neural Network (EWH-ANN) EWH-ANN can be employed to optimize English instruction at college level in general and verbal improvement in particular. It can make English teaching more efficient and customized to fulfil individual students' necessities. The study concluded that The Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) can be used to tune the hyper-parameters of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to improve the accuracy of the operation