Gamifying Foundational STEM Skills

© 2016 IEEE. University education has always required numeracy and literacy to underpin development of higher-level knowledge and skills. In many countries, education policies have often followed transitory fashions, both in mathematics and language education, enfeebling potentially generations of their youth. The use of technological innovations can amplify or hinder the development of foundation skills, and for digital natives this is their norm. In this paper we address this issue by describing the development of a gamified approach to learning, aimed at reinforcing and developing the fundamental knowledge of basic elements, whilst enhancing more conceptual skills, such as pattern recognition and hyper search strategies. These latter are increasingly important in the digital world. We focus here on numeracy skills, illustrating both how rote learning is practiced \u27incidentally\u27 as strategic pattern recognition is developed in a game context. We detail how the application can be used diagnostically and normatively as it is mapped to outcome based educational levels and standards. We then discuss the extension of the approach to language development, and show implications for educational information systems design

Interface development for a gaze-controlled reading support application

© 2015 IEEE. This paper describes development of an application to support the digital reading of academic texts by non-native speakers, in particular Emirati University students. Text interaction is unobtrusively controlled by gaze, tracked at word level, offering user-directed support and reporting data useful for reading assessment at individual and aggregate levels. After briefly outlining some specific reading difficulties we describe specific technical requirements and features, the application design process, and results from iterative evaluation of prototypes with target user representatives

An Evaluation of the ABEL System

This thesis evaluates and discusses the ABEL system, an interactive theorem prover, developed at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. The ABEL system is ultimately intended to be an environment for program development, including program verification, and is built on the work of Ole-Johan Dahl in the field of formal specification and verification. A review of the necessary background theory is given, including short descriptions of some other theorem provers and verification systems. The review also includes explanations of the most prevalent techniques for mechanised theorem proving. Additionally, the thesis contains a user's guide to the system, meant to help new users of the ABEL system getting started. Some tests of the proof system is performed, wherein its performance with respect to the needs of program verification is investigated. An evaluation is performed, and conclusions drawn on what the system's main weaknesses are. Finally, with this evaluation as background, suggestions are made on how to develop the system further into a true verification system

Interacting with a Chatbot-Based Advising System: Understanding the Effect of Chatbot Personality and User Gender on Behavior

Chatbots with personality have been shown to affect engagement and user subjective satisfaction. Yet, the design of most chatbots focuses on functionality and accuracy rather than an interpersonal communication style. Existing studies on personality-imbued chatbots have mostly assessed the effect of chatbot personality on user preference and satisfaction. However, the influence of chatbot personality on behavioral qualities, such as users’ trust, engagement, and perceived authenticity of the chatbots, is largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, this study contributes: (1) A detailed design of a personality-imbued chatbot used in academic advising. (2) Empirical findings of an experiment with students who interacted with three different versions of the chatbot. Each version, vetted by psychology experts, represents one of the three dominant traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. The experiment focused on the effect of chatbot personality on trust, authenticity, engagement, and intention to use the chatbot. Furthermore, we assessed whether gender plays a role in students’ perception of the personality-imbued chatbots. Our findings show a positive impact of chatbot personality on perceived chatbot authenticity and intended engagement, while student gender does not play a significant role in the students’ perception of chatbots

An Automated Peak Identification/Calibration Procedure for High-Dimensional Protein Measures From Mass Spectrometers

Discovery of “signature” protein profiles that distinguish disease states (eg, malignant, benign, and normal) is a key step towards translating recent advancements in proteomic technologies into clinical utilities. Protein data generated from mass spectrometers are, however, large in size and have complex features due to complexities in both biological specimens and interfering biochemical/physical processes of the measurement procedure. Making sense out of such high-dimensional complex data is challenging and necessitates the use of a systematic data analytic strategy. We propose here a data processing strategy for two major issues in the analysis of such mass-spectrometry-generated proteomic data: (1) separation of protein “signals” from background “noise” in protein intensity measurements and (2) calibration of protein mass/charge measurements across samples. We illustrate the two issues and the utility of the proposed strategy using data from a prostate cancer biomarker discovery project as an example

Xyce parallel electronic simulator design.

This document is the Xyce Circuit Simulator developer guide. Xyce has been designed from the 'ground up' to be a SPICE-compatible, distributed memory parallel circuit simulator. While it is in many respects a research code, Xyce is intended to be a production simulator. As such, having software quality engineering (SQE) procedures in place to insure a high level of code quality and robustness are essential. Version control, issue tracking customer support, C++ style guildlines and the Xyce release process are all described. The Xyce Parallel Electronic Simulator has been under development at Sandia since 1999. Historically, Xyce has mostly been funded by ASC, the original focus of Xyce development has primarily been related to circuits for nuclear weapons. However, this has not been the only focus and it is expected that the project will diversify. Like many ASC projects, Xyce is a group development effort, which involves a number of researchers, engineers, scientists, mathmaticians and computer scientists. In addition to diversity of background, it is to be expected on long term projects for there to be a certain amount of staff turnover, as people move on to different projects. As a result, it is very important that the project maintain high software quality standards. The point of this document is to formally document a number of the software quality practices followed by the Xyce team in one place. Also, it is hoped that this document will be a good source of information for new developers