Web teaching and learning programming environment based on plan method and constructs

Plan integrations and misconception of programming language constructs have been two major errors of novice programmers. A good design model can have a great impact on the effectiveness of these systems. A plan is an abstraction that visually provides a solution to a problem or to a subproblem representing a problem from its macro level down to its micro level. Any important concept is a plan and it is up to the educator and level of learner to decide a particular plan. A plan can be visually represented by a dot, a geometric shape or an image. The Web Visual Learning System (WVLS) divides the process of learning and its enforcement into three selectable phases known as plan observation, plan integration, and plan creation. WVLS initially provides a library of sample problems (plans) working with all three phases. A learner can observe the process of solving a problem, become involved in a partial solution, or solve the problem entirely from beginning to end. A mixture of learning strategies and techniques is incorporated in WVLS to satisfy a wide range of learners. WVLS will identify and report the cause of problems to the learner. A systematic approach to analysing a solution based on plan relationships indicates whether a plan is missing, misplaced, malformed, or has a misconception.Education for the 21 st century - impact of ICT and Digital Resources ConferenceRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Web teaching and learning programming environment based on plan method and constructs

Plan integrations and misconception of programming language constructs have been two major errors of novice programmers. A good design model can have a great impact on the effectiveness of these systems. A plan is an abstraction that visually provides a solution to a problem or to a subproblem representing a problem from its macro level down to its micro level. Any important concept is a plan and it is up to the educator and level of learner to decide a particular plan. A plan can be visually represented by a dot, a geometric shape or an image. The Web Visual Learning System (WVLS) divides the process of learning and its enforcement into three selectable phases known as plan observation, plan integration, and plan creation. WVLS initially provides a library of sample problems (plans) working with all three phases. A learner can observe the process of solving a problem, become involved in a partial solution, or solve the problem entirely from beginning to end. A mixture of learning strategies and techniques is incorporated in WVLS to satisfy a wide range of learners. WVLS will identify and report the cause of problems to the learner. A systematic approach to analysing a solution based on plan relationships indicates whether a plan is missing, misplaced, malformed, or has a misconception.Education for the 21 st century - impact of ICT and Digital Resources ConferenceRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Enhancing apprentice-based learning of Java

Various methods have been proposed in the past to improve student learning by introducing new styles of working with assignments. These include problem-based learning, use of case studies and apprenticeship. In most courses, however, these proposals have not resulted in a widespread significant change of teaching methods. Most institutions still use a traditional lecture/lab class approach with a strong separation of tasks between them. In part, this lack of change is a consequence of the lack of easily available and appropriate tools to support the introduction of new approaches into mainstream courses.In this paper, we consider and extend these ideas and propose an approach to teaching introductory programming in Java that integrates assignments and lectures, using elements of all three approaches mentioned above. In addition, we show how the BlueJ interactive programming environment [7] (a Java development environment aimed at education) can be used to provide the type of support that has hitherto hindered the widespread take-up of these approaches. We arrive at a teaching method that is motivating, effective and relatively easy to put into practice. Our discussion includes a concrete example of such an assignment, followed by a description of guidelines for the design of this style of teaching unit

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

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

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Combining Terrier with Apache Spark to Create Agile Experimental Information Retrieval Pipelines

Experimentation using IR systems has traditionally been a procedural and laborious process. Queries must be run on an index, with any parameters of the retrieval models suitably tuned. With the advent of learning-to-rank, such experimental processes (including the appropriate folding of queries to achieve cross-fold validation) have resulted in complicated experimental designs and hence scripting. At the same time, machine learning platforms such as Scikit Learn and Apache Spark have pioneered the notion of an experimental pipeline , which naturally allows a supervised classification experiment to be expressed a series of stages, which can be learned or transformed. In this demonstration, we detail Terrier-Spark, a recent adaptation to the Terrier Information Retrieval platform which permits it to be used within the experimental pipelines of Spark. We argue that this (1) provides an agile experimental platform for information retrieval, comparable to that enjoyed by other branches of data science; (2) aids research reproducibility in information retrieval by facilitating easily-distributable notebooks containing conducted experiments; and (3) facilitates the teaching of information retrieval experiments in educational environments