Studios in software engineering education

Computing has its roots in mathematics, where lectures are the dominant mode of education. Software engineering (SE) education, born from computer science, is also traditionally taught using lectures, but has grown beyond its mathematical roots; as the name implies, it is an engineering discipline. It is arguably necessary for SE to rethink its approach to education. Studio education is one alternative being explored. Studios originated from architecture and design, and are complex spaces used by collocated students to collaboratively and individually work on projects; they emphasise a physical “home” for students, problem-based and peer-based learning, and mentoring by academic staff rather than formal lectures. There are inherent similarities between SE and the original studio disciplines: e.g. we often use the architecture of buildings as metaphors when designing and describing software. This suggests that studios in SE should be further explored, despite its apparent lack of uptake across institutions worldwide. This thesis aims to provide useful information for anyone considering utilizing a studio-based approach. Initially, with no widely accepted definition for studio education available, a series of interviews with design/architecture studio educators was conducted, culminating in an understanding in the form of the ‘studio framework’. This is followed by further interviews, with SE studio educators, to determine their perspective of studio education, and exploring the SE specific elements to studio education. Finally, experiences and observations are shared of Lancaster University’s recent SE studio, comparing it to the studio framework

From Smart Homes to Smart-ready Homes and Communities

Background: People have various and changing needs as they age and the number of people living with some form of dementia is steadily increasing. Smart homes have a unique potential to provide assisted living but are often designed rigidly with a specific and fixed problem in mind. Objectives: To make smart-ready homes and communities that can be adaptively and easily updated over time to support varying user needs and to deliver the needed assistance, empowerment and living independence. Method: The design and deployment of programmable assistive environment for older adults. Results: The use of platform technology (a special form of what is known today as the Internet of Things, or IoT) has enabled the decoupling of goal setting and application development from sensing and assistive technology deployment and insertion in the assistive environment. Personalising a smart home or changing its applications and its interfaces dynamically as the user needs change was possible and has been demonstrated successfully in one house - the Gator Tech Smart House. Scaling up the platform technology approach to a planned living community is underway at one of UK’s National Health Services (NHS) Healthy New Town projects. Conclusions: There is a great need to integrate technology with living spaces to provide assistance and independent living. But to smarten these spaces for lifelong living, the technology and the smart home applications must be flexible, adaptive and changeable over time. However, people do not just live at home, they live in communities. Looking at the big picture (communities), as well as the small (homes), we consider how to progress beyond smart-ready homes towards smart-ready communities

Persuasive Health:Back to the Future

With individual behaviour and lifestyle determining 30-50% of people’s health, research and supportive technology for affecting behaviour alteration remain urgently needed. Most existing persuasive systems are designed to persuade a user to change a finite set of behaviours to achieve a specific goal. However, if the user’s situation or goal changes, such systems cannot adapt to the changes. A much more robust type of persuasive systems is needed today to enable adequate health navigation and to empower people to face and change their own realities in terms of a large variety of health behaviours and lifestyles. In this paper, we provide a perspective on the impressive body of work contributed over the past 15 years, to better look into the future of persuasive health and to the opportunities a broader theoretical framework and practical methodologies may bring about. We present a taxonomy that attempts to explain the contributions in this field including health behaviour theory, cybernetic action behaviour models, social cognitive theory, and control theory. We identify potentially promising approaches to advance persuasive health’s efficacy in empowering individuals to improve their own health outcomes

Mobile Age:Open Data Mobile Apps to Support Independent Living

We present design insights for developing mobile services for senior citizens which have emerged through substantive engagement with end users and other stakeholders. We describe the aims of the Mobile Age project, and the ideas and rationale for applications that have emerged through a co-creation process. A trusted data platform is proposed along with apps that bring open data and mobile technology to work for an underserved population

Demo: Helping to Tackle Social Isolation and Loneliness of Older Adults Using Mobile Applications

We live in a society with an ageing population in which the number of 65+ will significantly increase within the next 50 years. In parallel, we observe an increasing amount of technology deployed to people - both in the form of more sophisticated mobile phones as well as in the amount of technology ubiquitously integrated into the environment. With the ageing population, it will become increasingly important to accommodate the needs and requirements of older adults when designing systems and applications. We believe that mobile devices offer a unique opportunity to support older adults by, for example, providing access to citizen services to address the risks of social isolation and loneliness of older adults. Related work has been focussed on designing systems (fixed and mobile) that address the physical, cognitive and sensory needs of older adults [2, 3, 5] and on exploring HCI-related issues when designing applications for older adults (e.g. [4, 5]). We have previously conducted a series of co-creation workshops with older adults in which we determined a set of broader design considerations and requirements for developing mobile applications and systems for this demographic [1]

Examining Interdependencies and Constraints in Co-Creation

This paper reports on the first year of a three-year-long cocreation project with older adults. We focus our analysis on one particular workshop in which participants stopped designing and began to think about promoting the app we were co-creating. The workshop proved uniquely important for examining assumptions we had made about how and why the co-creation process would be successful. This paper concedes flaws in these assumptions and in the execution of the methodology as a way of illuminating dynamics that act on research projects in ways that are antithetical to effective co-creation. Reporting on the unexpected results of our participant engagements, we reveal new insights into the challenges in executing co-creation methodology

Combining data mining and text mining for detection of early stage dementia:the SAMS framework

In this paper, we describe the open-source SAMS framework whose novelty lies in bringing together both data collection (keystrokes, mouse movements, application pathways) and text collection (email, documents, diaries) and analysis methodologies. The aim of SAMS is to provide a non-invasive method for large scale collection, secure storage, retrieval and analysis of an individual’s computer usage for the detection of cognitive decline, and to infer whether this decline is consistent with the early stages of dementia. The framework will allow evaluation and study by medical professionals in which data and textual features can be linked to deficits in cognitive domains that are characteristic of dementia. Having described requirements gathering and ethical concerns in previous papers, here we focus on the implementation of the data and text collection components

Supporting Older Adults Using Privacy-Aware IoT Analytics

Mobile computing and the IoT offer the potential to provide new applications to support our ageing population. However, there has been little research into the implications for system design of supporting this specific user demographic. In this paper we consider these implications, focusing in particular on an architectural design that offers the potential for complex cross-device analytics while meeting the privacy and usability concerns of older adults

Combining mouse and keyboard events with higher level desktop actions to detect mild cognitive impairment

We present a desktop monitoring application that combines keyboard, mouse, desktop and application-level activities. It has been developed to discover differences in cognitive functioning amongst older computer users indicative of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Following requirements capture from clinical domain experts, the tool collects all Microsoft Windows events deemed potentially useful for detecting early clinical indicators of dementia, with a view to further analysis to determine the most pertinent. Further requirements capture from potential end-users has resulted in a system that has little impact on users? daily activities and ensures data security from initial recording of events through to data analysis. We describe two experiments: firstly, volunteers were asked to perform a short set of known tasks; the second (ongoing) experiment is a longitudinal study, with the software currently successfully running on participants? computers