EasyCoding - methodology to support programming learning

Knowing that the programming curricular units in the first year of engineering courses have a high failure rate and, assuming that this failure is due, in large part, to the lack of motivation and the lack of autonomy of the student to program in context outside the classroom, a methodology based on activity guides using attractive web platforms is proposed. The proposed methodology aims to facilitate both the planning of activities by the teachers and the autonomy and motivation by students. In order to receive a first feedback about this work, the methodology is being used by programming professors from Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, but in the near future it will be also evaluated by professors from the Federal Center of Technological Education of Minas Gerais and from the Federal Technological University of Paraná, both from Brazil. Following this work, a system is being developed that allows the automatic construction of guides based on exercises available from the web and systems that facilitate the collection of solutions and analysis of results.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Lessons Learned from Modeling the Interaction with Conversational Agents

Intelligent conversational agents have become widespread. Inspired by conversations in natural language, they present different degrees of intelligence and autonomy, bringing challenges for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). One such challenge concerns design languages for modeling user-agent interaction. We focus here on MoLIC, a design-phase dialogue model based on Semiotic Engineering theory devised to represent user-system interactions as conversations. We performed two case studies with MoLIC interaction diagrams representing two conversational agents – the ANA chatbot and Samsung Bixby. We examined how the interactive aspects of these agents could be expressed in MoLIC. Although it was possible to express the general interaction, our results showed limitations related to the language expressiveness or its inadequacy to represent these systems. We identified limitations in the applicability of MoLIC in modeling and pondered on how to extend or adapt it; directing the HCI community to issues and initiatives that can help design and model these technologies

Characterizing the Effectiveness of Twitter Hashtags to Detect and Track Online Population Sentiment

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-1016-1/12/05. In this paper we describe the preliminary results and future directions of a research in progress, which aims at assessing the hashtag effectiveness as a resource for sentiment analysis expressed on Twitter. The results so far support our hypothesis that hashtags may facilitate the detection and automatic tracking of online population sentiment about different events