Blockchain and Sustainability: A Tertiary Study

Blockchain is an emerging technology with potential to address issues related to sustainability. Literature reviews on blockchain and sustainability exist, but there is a need to consolidate existing results, in particular, in terms of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This extended abstract presents an ongoing tertiary study based on existing literature reviews to investigate the relationship between blockchain and sustainability in terms of SDGs. Results from a pilot analysis of 18 reviews using thematic analysis are presented.Comment: Accepted by BoKSS 2021, to be published by IEE

DESIGNING AND TESTING A MOBILE APP TO FIGHT CHILD, EARLY, AND FORCED MARRIAGE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Child marriage is still a severe issue in developing countries. Among the strategies that work most to fight it, is empowering girls with information combined with the education of parents and community. As smartphones are more accessible year after year in developing countries, we want to investigate how a mobile app could effectively fight child marriage and which characteristics such an app should have. The research was organized into three main phases. The first phase was focused on 4 expert semi-structured interviews to understand if an app could be a good solution to help in fighting child marriage. The second and third phases were based on a case study with young girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The second phase had focus groups with 26 girls to test and improve the requi-sites of the app, and the third phase had a questionnaire that 14 girls had to fill out after trying the app. The study shows that girls in developing countries have access to smartphones, and most can use the developed app satisfactorily and that it is worth continuing to study this problem as an app could be a new instrument to use alongside traditional tools

Social Innovation And Social Entrepreneurship Through Big Data: Developing A Reseach Agenda

The power of big data and their applications are evident through the enormous attention they have received over the past few years, with the majority of the research focusing on solving technical and business problems. However, the challenge remains on how to harness the potential of big data in order to come up with innovative solutions on various societal problems. Big data have the potential to change the way that entrepreneurs as well as the other stakeholders of a social ecosystem take decisions, and develop new paths to create social innovation by taking data-driven decisions. Nonetheless, there is limited understanding on how social ecosystems need to change to embrace the advancement that big data entail. There is a need to institutionalize innovation through big data and social entrepreneurship, and examine how to successfully exploit big data towards achieving social good and sustainable change. We suggest building on the current state of the art, and go beyond it by merging and extending the findings with insights from the different stakeholders involved in the social innovation process. Further, we propose developing and testing a framework of best practices, that will be used as a roadmap by interested parties to successfully employ big data for social innovation, through the development of prototype applications which will clearly showcase the impact of big data on addressing societal challenges. This position paper concludes with research questions and challenges for future studies in the area

Evaluation of team dynamic in Norwegian projects for IT students

The need for teaching realistic software development in project courses has increased in a global scale. It has always been challenges in cooperating fast-changing software technologies, development methodologies and teamwork. Moreover, such project courses need to be designed in the connection to existing theoretical courses. We performed a large-scale research on student performance in Software Engineering projects in Norwegian universities. This paper investigates four aspects of team dynamics, which are team reflection, leadership, decision making and task assignment in order to improve student learning. Data was collected from student projects in 4 years at two universities. We found that some leader's characteristics are perceived differently for female and male leaders, including the perception of leaders as skilful workers or visionaries. Leadership is still a challenging aspect to teach, and assigned leadership is probably not the best way to learn. Students is are performing well in task review, however, needs support while performing task assignment. The result also suggests that task management to be done in more fine-grained levels. It is also important to maintain an open and active discussion to facilitate effective group decision makings

HikePal: A mobile exergame to motivate people with intellectual disabilities to do outdoor physical activities

People with intellectual disabilities often have a sedentary lifestyle that can lead to long-term issues like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity and depression. Although literature shows that the main reason for this is the lack of motivation to do physical activity, scarce research has been done in accessible apps to track and foster physical activities that address motivation. This paper presents HikePal, a game-inspired app to motivate individuals with intellectual disabilities to do physical activity outdoors. We have followed a design and creation research strategy using 1) semi-structured interviews with five experts (health care workers, special education experts and software engineers); 2) a focus group with an occupational therapist, a physical therapist and four software engineers; 3) a pilot user test with three individuals with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers. Having social interaction during the physical activity turned out to be a major motivational aspect of the system, whereas reward systems did not attract much of the users’ attention. Regarding the adapted navigational assistance, we found out that easy-to-read text, visual communication and street-level pictures were the key features to achieve successful and understandable guidance outdoors for people with intellectual disabilities. It proved useful to perform a test on the field and to refine the design guidelines in view of a forthcoming large-scale experimental test involving a larger number of persons with intellectual, sensory and motor disabilities

Evaluating Digital Creativity Support for Children: A Systematic Literature Review

Creativity, the process of creating something new and valuable, benefits children by improving their skills and development, encouraging interaction and engagement, and enabling the generation and expression of novel ideas. In recent years, interactive digital tools have emerged to support the user’s creativity in the open-ended creation of new artifacts. However, the question of evaluating the creativity happening in the interplay between children, digital tools, and products is still open. This systematic literature review investigated the evaluations of digital creativity support tools for children and identified 81 peer-reviewed relevant articles from the last 10 years. This research contributes to practitioners and researchers by providing an overview of the evaluations in a framework based on 10 factors (value, novelty, fluency, enjoyment, user feeling, collaboration, expressiveness, immersion, flexibility, and interaction), nine product areas, three approaches, and five methods. The review demonstrated that the evaluations differ widely, and the area lacks a standard evaluation framework. We propose the dimensions of our analysis as an initial framework for situating the evaluation of digital creativity support tools for children that the child–computer interaction community can further refine

RealCoins: A Case Study of Enhanced Model Driven Development for Pervasive Games

Model Driven Development (MDD) and Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) have been widely used in information system domains and achieved success in many open or in-house scenarios. But its application in the game domain is seldom and immature. In our research, we identified three issues that should be considered carefully in order to play the strength of MDD in the game development environment to a larger extend: 1) structured domain analysis should be done to assure the size and familiarity of the domain; 2) adapted process should be designed to save cost and support evolution; and 3) proper tools (especially language workbenches) should be evaluated and utilized to ease DSM tasks and accelerate iterations. In this paper, we explain these three issues and illustrate our solutions to them by presenting the development details (both technical and procedural) of one pervasive game case. We evaluate the gains and costs by involving MDD into the game development process. We reflect on the issues we have met, and discuss possible future works as well.an open access journa

Achieving agility and quality in product development -an empirical study of hardware startups

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Gender Differences in Computer Science Education: Lessons Learnt from an Empirical Study at NTNU

Research in Computer Science (CS) education has focused on gender differences and there is high interest in increasing female participation in CS. The present study reviews important factors that influence CS students’ decision to complete their studies in CS (retention), and empirically examines how these factors differ for males and females. To this end, we identify cognitive and non-cognitive gains, cognitive and affective engagement, motivation to study, and three different barriers as critical factors in CS students’. We test these factors on 236 Norwegian CS students in order to find any potential gender differences. The findings indicate a gender difference for cognitive gains, affective engagement, motivation to study, and satisfaction with learning effectiveness. On the other hand, no difference was found for non-cognitive gains, cognitive engagement, personal values/teaching quality, and students’ intention to dropout from their studies. The study concludes with implications that will guide both research and practice towards a better understanding of both male and female CS students