System-supported instructor feedback on the students’ design and prototyping processes in Fab Lab education context

Abstract. Fab Lab represents a unique concept in educational platforms where both teachers and students can get access to work on digital fabrication. Digital fabrication allows students to do creative tasks using different categorized software tools and technologies in the Fab Lab. Most of the time, students and instructors face challenges to compile a successful job through prototype designing and documentation in the proper way. Instructors have no opportunity to give feedback to the students’ prototyping and documentation through any dedicated application in the present Fab Lab. For evaluating digital fabrication, it isn’t easy to provide timely feedback in the traditional approaches. For this reason, the present thesis proposes a solution to the difficulty of giving timely feedback to the students based on their documentation and prototyping design which considers a reflection as an activity in Fab Lab. The solution based on several iterations of Fab Lab Oulu digital fabrication courses. This thesis presents means of Interaction and communication for both teachers and students using comment which helps students create a new and unique concept of prototype design through an application in Fab Lab. Based on the submission of students’ weekly prototypes, this application implements the questionnaires for evaluation. It focuses on the easy way to give proper feedback to the students in the Fab Lab education context. This task performed various functions for developing new techniques for giving feedback, such as an evaluation of students. In this thesis, we developed a new application named "Protobooth Oulu" for providing feedback to the students. This thesis represents a real demonstration that assigns different scaling such as, rating, Semantic Differential, and Likert scales for grading the projects and giving feedback to students by instructors, which is also helpful to make decisions. This scaling can compare the current and previous works and quantify the development of individual students’ works. This study also focuses on the various stages of prototyping and different satisfaction levels of the students. As a result, meaningful feedback comes from the educators, which is visible to both the instructors and the students. We also hope to develop new functions for education which are visual and fetch the data based on specific scaling in future. Adding more scaling helps educators give feedback very specifically on the students’ prototyping design, and excellent results will be accurate and can be predicted

Culture practices of freshwater giant prawn in some selected areas of Mymensingh

A study was conducted to examine the culture practices of freshwater giant prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii in some selected areas of Mymensingh. Based on a sample of 100 farmers from three different upazila, namely Phulpur, Gouripur and Ishwargonj in Mymensingh district, 94% of farmers cultured prawn with fish in their pond. Only 6% of farmers cultured prawn, fish and dike crops for higher economic return. The culture period is typically nine months; hatchery produced post-larvae were stocked from May to June and harvested from November to January. Per hectare production of prawn, 375 kg/yr was very low because the farmers followed simple culture method. Most of the farmers made a profit of Tk. 68,403/ha/yr and the major costs incurred were for purchasing prawn seed and feed. The culture of prawn in pond system is technically possible under different conditions though expansion of small-scale prawn farming mainly depends on reduction of production costs. Future targets could be integration of pond prawn culture with other agricultural activities especially dike cropping and rice production in the monsoon

The impact of mobile amusement information on use behavior, satisfaction, and loyalty

The relationship between satisfaction and loyalty has been well explored in services marketing or customer relationship management. In this study, the authors studied the relationship of 7 types of service variables under “amusement” factor. Amusement is one of the three factors extracted from 21 mobile information services. Among many different frameworks of satisfaction-loyalty, we used the framework of “past use behavior” on “satisfaction”, and then of “satisfaction” on “continued use intention” (or loyalty), resulting in a strong support of the existing model with positive significant influence on the both paths. Further, our research reveals that, on the both paths, there are stronger, significant positive relationships between a latent variable and the measurement variables for mobile information services with stronger amusement elements than those with other ones. The results lead to useful implications that amusement is a crucial dimension in mobile information services, not only in use motivation, but also on behavior, satisfaction, and continued use intention

Homeshare Scheme

Homeshare is a scheme in which older people – ‘Homeowners’ - provide an affordable home to young professionals or possibly students – ‘Homesharers’ - in exchange for help or support with everyday tasks (e.g. shopping and cleaning), and companionship. This pairing is intended to be mutually beneficial, whereby older people are provided with help and support to live independently and young people are offered a much needed home. There are similar schemes in London, but nothing like this is currently in place in Leeds. This report presents findings from a research project conducted in Leeds to investigate the demand for this service and the feasibility of this type of scheme. The research was funded by Leeds Metropolitan University and Leeds City Council

Modelling intention to use third party logistics: an application of the theory of planned behaviour

The role and impact of behavioural factors in the business customers’ decision to outsource a service to a third party logistics (3PL) provider is the subject of this thesis. Unless it is understand what extent the decision to use 3PL is driven by behavioural factors, it will hardly know how best to improve the quality of 3PL decision making process that can promote strong growth in logistics based industries and be compatible with global customer demands. Applying the theory of planned behaviour as the theoretical foundation for modeling business customers’ intention, it investigates how attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control predict the intention to use 3PL, and whether such intention is translated into the actual 3PL use or not. The behavioural model is built in the context of Bangladesh; 243 business organisations are at its core. The structural equation modelling results show that, business customers who exhibit a positive attitude tend to favour 3PL use. The perceptions of social pressure, exerted from operating in a competitive environment, and of the capacity and control to make decisions, are indicative of a positive decision to outsource services to 3PL providers. The multi-group invariance test shows that, there is no difference in intention between 3PL users and non-users. To promote greater use of outsourcing services in a developing country like Bangladesh, it is important to streamline existing 3PL decision making processes so that the resulting improved 3PL environment can play a key role in its efforts to maintain strong growth in logistics based industries that are compatible with global outsourcing practices

Spatial modelling of bacterial diversity over the selected regions in Bangladesh by next-generation sequencing: role of water temperature

In this study, a spatial model has been developed to investigate the role of water temperature to the distribution of bacteria over the selected regions in the Bay of Bengal, located in the southern region of Bangladesh using next-generation sequencing. Bacterial concentration, quantitative polymerase chain reactions, and sequencing were performed on water samples and identified Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chlorobi, Chloroflexi, Cyanobacteria, Firmicutes, Nitrospirae, Planctomycetes, Proteobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia. The spatial model tessellated the parts of the Bay of Bengal with hexagons and analyzed the relationship between the distribution of bacteria and water temperature. A geographically weighted regression was used to observe whether water temperature contributed strongly or weakly to the distribution of bacteria. The residuals were examined to assess the model’s fitness. The spatial model has the potential to predict the bacterial diversity in the selected regions of Bangladesh