Local Area Network (LAN)-Based Digital Signage Solution Using Raspberry Pi

This article outlines a case study in which the author employs a Raspberry Pi 3 miniature computer as a Digital Signage System, which can be managed from either laptop, smartphone or desktop computers. The author presents it as a case study that high school students (and their teachers) can follow, as a collaborative project that delivers a cost effective and flexible, digital signage system for their school. While it does not require any coding on their part, it presents an excellent use of ICT, by configuring multiple interrelated hardware and open software, in a school community setting, that would fit in with many contemporary digital technology curriculums.

Developing Critical Understanding of Computing With the Raspberry Pi

This article describes a research project for exploring learning activities with Raspberry Pis in four school contexts in the UK. The aim of the project was to compare different learning designs, which had the shared objective of developing computational competencies, to investigate how these designs might simultaneously develop critical understanding of both the practices of Computing and students' own learning with respect to those practices. The study used a novel ‘before/after' implementation of Q methodology in combination with participant observations and reflective interviews with twenty-eight pupils. Findings suggested that where pupils were already predisposed to future involvement in Computing practices, working with Raspberry Pis did develop critical understanding, in ways that were less dependent on learning design. For those who had a more naïve or indifferent view of Computing, the pedagogy was most influential on how student perspectives developed, a pedagogy of expressibility being the key to supporting greater criticality.

High School Introductory Programming on Raspberry Pi Made from Scratch

This article investigates the use of Raspberry Pi and Scratch to introduce novice high school students to computer programming during a short interaction. Results show that, with only a four-hour engagement, students show a significant increase in programming self-efficacy. Furthermore, results show that this increase is the same for both males and females. This provides promising results for those who wish to effectively introduce programming to novices, even over a short engagement period.

Inclusion of Users with Special Needs in the Human-Centered Design of a Web-Portal

Human-Centered Design focuses on the analysis, specification and involvement of a product's end users as driving elements in the design process. The primary research objective of the case-study presented in this paper is to illustrate that it is essential to include users with special needs into all major steps of designing a web-portal that provides services to these special users. But how can this be accomplished in the case of users with special cognitive and affective needs? Would the “classical” Human-Centered Design Process (HCD) be sufficient or would it need to be adapted and complemented with special procedures and tools? In this paper the design team shares the strategies they adopted and the experiences they gained by including users with dyslexia in the design of the LITERACY Web-Portal. Besides providing insight into the special effort and steps needed to adapt HCD for users with special needs, the paper encourages application designers to include end-users even though - or particularly because - they have needs that are special and critical for the adoption of the product.

Wolfram Language for Teaching Computational Thinking to K-12 Learners

Computational thinking is a necessary skill, but developing it among young learners can be a difficult process. Wolfram Research, known in part for its accessible Wolfram Language and complex computational tool Mathematica, has recently developed new initiatives for introducing computational thinking to novice learners. These tools help make computational thinking accessible to students across the K12 curriculum.

End User Perspective of e-Learning using LMS-Like Systems

In literature, e-learning plays an important part in improving the needs of learners and educators, as well as other stakeholders and institutions. However, this research indicates that e-learning is often used as a repository for uploading academic materials, without taking into consideration characteristics of the learner. This investigation examines a variety of techniques adopted from e-learning, adaptive learning and User Modelling to suggest improvements within industry. Throughout the paper, there will be a strong influence on how future PLEs should be designed and tailored to challenge the end users' perception of on-line education to meet the future needs of the learner, the educator and the institution. Focusing on future trends would allow developers to encapsulate learners motivational and learning needs. These aspects would enable designers to improve usability, functionality and reliability. PLEs are not just a collection of applications tailored towards personalisation, they are significantly more important than that. These systems are designed to be a functioned application/platform/management-system that promotes and encourages Personalised Learning. The research found within the case studies have shown that concepts of PLEs have contributed towards the learners' experience.

Natural Shell

Scripting is a widely-used way to automate the execution of tasks. Despite the popularity of scripting, it remains difficult to use for both beginners and experts: because of the cryptic commands for the first group, and incompatible syntaxes across different systems, for the latter group. The authors introduce Natural Shell, an assistant for enabling end-users to generate commands and scripts for various purposes. Natural Shell automatically synthesizes scripts for different shell systems based on natural language descriptions. By interacting with Natural Shell, new users can learn the basics of scripting languages without the obstacles from the incomprehensible syntaxes. On the other hand, the authors' tool frees more advanced users from manuals when they switch shell systems. The authors have developed a prototype system and demonstrate its effectiveness with a benchmark of 50 examples of popular shell commands collected from online forums. In addition, the authors analyzed the usage of Natural Shell in a lab study that involves 10 participants with different scripting skill levels. Natural Shell effectively assists the users to generate commands in assigned syntaxes and greatly streamlines their learning and using experience.

An Empirical Comparison of Java and C# Programs in Following Naming Conventions

An important indicator of source code quality is compliance with naming conventions. It is believed that such practices improve program comprehension, which directly affects maintainability and reusability. In this paper, the authors conduct an experiment to determine how well Java and C# programs follow a set of well-publicized naming practices. The experiment evaluated 120 arbitrarily selected open-source Java and C# classes from different programmers with respect to four naming conventions. The results indicate that Java and C# programs do not always follow naming conventions. However, Java developers are more attentive than C# developers in terms of following naming practices. A disturbing trend was found in variable and constant naming conventions, which were violated in most C# subjects. Moreover, there is a positive correlation between the number of violations found in a C# class and its size but a negative correlation in case of Java class. The findings are expected to contribute to the existing knowledge of the use of coding standards and source code quality. The paper also discusses the threats to the validity of the study and suggests open issues for future research.

Hasselt

Implementing multimodal interactions with event-driven languages results in a ‘callback soup', a source code littered with a multitude of flags that have to be maintained in a self-consistent manner and across different event handlers. Prototyping multimodal interactions adds to the complexity and error sensitivity, since the program code has to be refined iteratively as developers explore different possibilities and solutions. The authors present a declarative language for rapid prototyping multimodal interactions: Hasselt permits declaring composite events, sets of events that are logically related because of the interaction they support, that can be easily bound to dedicated event handlers for separate interactions. The authors' approach allows the description of multimodal interactions at a higher level of abstraction than event languages, which saves developers from dealing with the typical ‘callback soup' thereby resulting in a gain in programming efficiency and a reduction in errors when writing event handling code. They compared Hasselt with using a traditional programming language with strong support for events in a study with 12 participants each having a solid background in software development. When performing equivalent modifications to a multimodal interaction, the use of Hasselt leads to higher completion rates, lower completion times, and less code testing than when using a mainstream event-driven language.

Towards ProGesture, a Tool Supporting Early Prototyping of 3D-Gesture Interaction

Development of gesture interaction requires a combination of three design matters: gesture, presentation, and dialog. However, in current work on rapid prototyping the focus is on gestures taking into account only the presentation. Model-based development incorporating gestures, in contrast, supports the gesture and dialog dimensions. The work on ProGesture aims at a rapid prototyping tool supporting a coherent development within the whole gesture-presentation-dialog design space. In this contribution, a first version of ProGesture is introduced. Here, gestures are specified by demonstrating the movements or they are composed of other gestures. The tool also provides a dialog editor, which allows gestures to be assigned to dialog models. Based on its executable runtime system the models and gestures can be tested and evaluated. In addition, gestures can be bound to first presentations or existing applications and evaluated in their context.