Designing learning activities for experiential learning in a design thinking course

Will add publication details once it is on the website.</p

Evolving an information systems capstone course to align with the fast changing Singapore marketplace

Every year, around fifty-five undergraduate teams of four to six students are required to complete a capstone course for the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Each team spends approximately five months working with an industry sponsor using the latest tools and techniques. Students actively learn by implementing the system to solve a real world problem. In addition to delivering value to the local sponsor, our students learn specialized skills currently needed in the marketplace, which might not yet be incorporated into electives and core courses. In this paper, we discuss the tradeoffs of providing students and project sponsors flexibility in designing projects while at the same time ensuring that all students are delivering consistent, assessable milestones. We will also discuss how the tools and techniques available to students are continually changing what the students are able to accomplish in a fixed amount of time

How to and how much? Teaching ethics in an interaction design course

tru

Effects of Bimodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Modulation of Spinal Circuitry in People with Chronic Post-Stroke Hemiparesis

Background: Stroke can lead to gait abnormalities such as foot drop. Foot drop can result from decreased corticospinal tract input to the ankle dorsiflexors and/or from exaggerated stretch reflexes on the soleus due to reduced reciprocal inhibition from spinal reflex pathways. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) attempts to modulate corticospinal tract input and spinal reflex pathways by delivering electrical signals to parts of the brain. The degree of neuromodulation from tDCS can be measured through the Hoffman Reflex (H-reflex)—a tool used to estimate alpha motor neuron excitability which is increased in individuals post-stroke. Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the acute effects of a session of bimodal tDCS combined with upslope treadmill walking on the H-reflex amplitude on people with chronic post-stroke hemiparesis. The secondary purpose of this study was to determine if reduced H-reflex excitability contributes to improved gait and balance function. Methods: Six individuals with chronic post-stroke hemiparesis received two randomly assigned treatment sessions. Each session included upslope treadmill walking paired with either bimodal or sham tDCS. Soleus H-reflex amplitude (H-max/M-max ratio), gait metrics, the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), and the Timed Up and Go (TUG) Test were collected pre- and post-treatment sessions. A 2 x 2 repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze data. Results: No statistically significant differences in H-reflex amplitude were observed between bimodal tDCS and sham groups. A statistically significant increase in paretic limb stride length was observed following stimulation. In addition, participants in the bimodal tDCS group had a higher BBS score after stimulation compared to the sham group. There were no differences between groups for the other dependent variables. Discussion: Further research on a larger sample size of this patient population is warranted on bimodal tDCS’ ability to regulate H-reflex excitability and improve function

ITSS: Interactive Web-Based Authoring and Playback Integrated Environment for Programming Tutorials

Video-based programming tutorials are a popular form of tutorial used by authors to guide learners to code. Still, the interactivity of these videos is limited primarily to control video flow. There are existing works with increased interactivity that are shown to improve the learning experience. Still, these solutions require setting up a custom recording environment and are not well-integrated with the playback environment. This paper describes our integrated ITSS environment and evaluates the ease of authoring and playback of our interactive programming tutorials. Our environment is designed to run within the browser sandbox and is less intrusive to record interactivity actions. We develop a recording approach that tracks the author's interactivity actions (e.g., typing code, highlighting words, scrolling panels) on the browser and stored in text and audio formats. We replay these actions using the recorded artefacts for learners to have a more interactive, integrated and realistic playback of the author's actions instead of watching video frames. Our design goals are 1) efficient recording and playback, 2) extensible interactivity features to help students learn better, and 3) a scalable web-based environment. Our first user study of 20 participants who carry out the author tasks agree that it is efficient and easy to author interactive videos in our environment with no additional software needed. Our second user study of 84 students using the environment agrees that the increased interactivity can help them learn better over a video-based tutorial. Our performance test shows that the environment can scale to support up to 500 concurrent users. We hope our open-source environment enable more educators to create interactive programming tutorials