Software Engineering Commons^™

Livelabs: Building An In-Situ Real-Time Mobile Experimentation Testbed, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present LiveLabs, a mobile experimentation testbed that is currently deployed across our university campus with further deployments at a large shopping mall, a commercial airport, and a resort island soon to follow. The key goal of LiveLabs is to allow in-situ real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers with real participants on their actual smart phones. We describe how LiveLabs works, and then explain the novel R&D required to realise it. We end with a descriptionof the current LiveLabs status (> 700 active participants to date) as well as present some key lessons learned.

Prelude - An Augmented Reality Ios Application For Music Education, Kristen Brown

Honors Projects

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology which serves to enhance the real world environment through the addition of relevant digital content, and has many potential applications within a variety of different fields, including, but not limited to, fields such as marketing, entertainment, medicine, and education. The purpose of this project is to develop an iOS augmented reality application for music educators that will serve as a tool in teaching students to recognize specific music notes and symbols.

Adaptive Gameplay For Programming Practice, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past four years, we have collaborated to develop a set of online games to enable users to practice software languages in a self-directed manner and as part of a class. Recently we introduced a new adaptive difficulty feature that enables players to self-regulate the difficulty of the games they are playing to practice. These new features also provide additional information to further adapt the problem content to better meet the needs of the users.

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses:

CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Blogging Developer Knowledge: Motivations, Challenges, And Future Directions, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Why do software developers place so much effort into writing public blog posts about their knowledge, experiences, and opinions on software development? What are the benefits, problems, and tools needed-what can the research community do to help? In this paper, we describe a research agenda aimed at understanding the motivations and issues of software development blogging. We interviewed developers as well as mined and analyzed their blog posts. For this initial study, we selected developers from various backgrounds: IDE plugin development, mobile development, and web development. We found that developers used blogging for a variety of functions such as documentation, …

Underpinning Statistical Computing Knowledge And Skills For Students, Wing Kin, Ken Li

Practical Social and Industrial Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Student Usage Patterns And Perceptions For Differentiated Lab Exercises In An Undergraduate Programming Course, Heng Ngee Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Differentiated instruction in the form of tiered take-home lab exercises was implemented for students of an undergraduate-level programming course. This paper attempts to uncover the perceptions and usage patterns of students toward these new lab exercises using a comprehensive survey. Findings reveal that these tiered exercises are generally very well received and preferred over their traditional "one size fits all" counter-parts. Although the study does not show that tiered exercises have improved proÞciency or scores, it does seem to indicate higher student engagement and motivation levels. Based on the survey results, a list of recommendations is put forth for the …

Setting Up A Low-Cost Lab Management System For A Multi-Purpose Computing Laboratory Using Virtualisation Technology, Heng Ngee Mok, Wee Kiat Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes how a generic computer laboratory equipped with 52 workstations is set up for teaching IT-related courses and other general purpose usage. The authors have successfully constructed a lab management system based on decentralised, client-side software virtualisation technology using Linux and free software tools from VMware that fulfils the requirements of fast "switch over" time between consecutive lab sessions, the ability to support a wide range of IT courses and usage scenarios, low cost, easy maintenance, and a sandboxed environment for potentially disruptive IT security lab exercises. Sufficient implementation details are provided so that readers can build a …

Case Study On Using A Programming Practice Tool For Evaluating University Applicants, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Kevin Steppe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We used a programming practice tool to test basic programming skills of prospective students. A live competition was used to test those skills. Students who did well were asked for further interviews. Most students had no prior background and reported learning the basics of two programming languages within two weeks of self-study.

Teaching Software Engineering Project Management-A Novel Approach For Software Engineering Programs, Craig Caulfield, David Veal, Stanislaw Maj

Research outputs 2011

In response to real and perceived short-comings in the quality and productivity of software engineering practices and projects, professionally-endorsed graduate and post-graduate curriculum guides have been developed to meet technical developments and evolving industry demands. Each of these curriculum guidelines identifies better software project management skills as critical for all graduating students, but they provide little guidance on how to achieve this. One possible way is to use a serious game - a game designed to teach and educate players about some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. This paper presents the results …

Supporting Introductory Test-Driven Labs With Webide, Thomas C. Dvornik

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a new web-based development environment for entry-level programmers with two primary goals: minimize tool barriers to writing computer programs and introduce software engineering best practices early in a student's educational career. Currently, WebIDE focuses on Test-Driven Learning (TDL) by using small iterative examples and introducing lock-step labs, which prevent the student from moving forward until they finish the current step. An initial set of labs and evaluators were created as examples of how to use WebIDE and were used in a pilot study in a CS0 course where students were split into two groups, one that used WebIDE …

Technology Capacity Development Through Oss Implementation: The Case Of Public Higher Education Institutions In Ethiopia, Nigussie Tadesse Mengesha

The African Journal of Information Systems

The Open Source Software (OSS) literature gives little attention to the study and practice of domain specific end-user OSS implementation in general and in the public sector of developing countries (DCs) in particular. This paper, however, investigates the trajectories of two OSS-based information systems (IS) implementation projects in a developing country (DC) context with the aim to uncover the practice-based learning and resource sharing evident among locally situated and globally dispersed developers and users. The result of the interpretative case study research shows that the OSS philosophy and practice of software development, implementation and ownership, facilitates for the emergence of …

Graduation Outliner, Jason Boyle

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Planning a quarterly course schedule is a difficult and laborious process for university students which must be repeated every quarter. Students are expected to determine which courses to take based on a large and complex set of requirement criteria. Most academic scheduling research has focused on faculty availability and desires. This project attempts to address the needs of students for whom no quarterly course schedule planning tool is widely available. A Java Swing-based application is described that allows students to create a graphical quarter-by-quarter visualization of the courses they plan to take. The application also accepts a list of graduation …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

M&S Body Of Knowledge: Progress Report And Look Ahead, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Exploratory Overview Of Teaching Computer Game Development, Mario Guimaraes, Meg C. Murray

Faculty Articles

The computer game industry has exploded reaching sales of several billion dollars a year and, consequently, a majority of college students are familiar with the gaming environment. In fact, videogame development has been cited as one way to motivate students to explore the world of Computer Science. However, most videogames are extremely complex computer programs created by a team of developers including programmers and graphic artists and represent thousands of hours of work. Fortunately there are software tools available that provide a way for simple computer games to be created fairly easily using a building block approach. This paper discusses …

Implementation Of Labcreator And The Integration Of Cyberlab, Kang Zhao

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

With the development of the World Wide Web, online courses are becoming more and more popular in modern science education. CyberLab aims to solve an important issue in distance science education -- laboratory experiments in online courses. It is a toolkit that handles creation, exportation, and execution of virtual experiments (within web browsers). It consists of LabCreator and LabExecutor. With LabCreator, instructors can create virtual experiments and export them into intermediate files. Students can download those files from online course websites and execute them in LabExecutor on their own computers.

The paper reports on the completion of two important tasks …

Advising Module: Graduate Application System For The Computer Science Graduate Program, Yen-Hsi Chiang

Theses Digitization Project

The Advising Module: Graduate Application System is a Web-based application system that provides quality advice on coursework for prospective as well as continuing graduate students. It also serves as an improved tracking system for the graduate coordinator. Authorized parties may obtain access to status evaluations, master's options, and permitted course waivers, course listings, personal data, various advisement forms, application usage statistics, and automatic data updating process reports.

Move To Component Based Architectures: Introducing Microsoft's .Net Platform Into The College Classroom, Meg C. Murray

Faculty Articles

A transformation has been occurring in the architectural model for computer-based application intense software systems. This new model, software-as-a-service, will have a profound impact on the design and development of software for many years to come and as such college level computing curriculums will need to incorporate the concepts and methodologies associated with this new architecture. The platform is built upon a view of interrelated, distributed peer-level software modules and components that work in tandem to achieve specified functional goals. From Microsoft's viewpoint, migration to the new platform requires a radical shift in the software development lifecycle. It is becoming …

Speech Enabled E-Learning Technology For Adult Literacy Tutoring, Jason Meade

Theses

This research presents the work involved in developing a speech-enabled e-Learning prototype for use in literacy tutoring. As the main objective was to develop an interface for literacy learning, initial research concentrated on establishing a framework for literacy e-Leaming through the use of speech technology. Requirements for best practice e-Learning and the relevance of learning theories to an e-Learning application were also investigated. The technologies to facilitate this, such as text to speech technologies and mark-up languages, were addressed during the implementation of speech-enabled prototypes. Both server-side and client-side prototypes were implemented to investigate speech technology. Testing found the server-side …

Enhancing The Cs Curriculum With With Aspect-Oriented Software Development (Aosd) And Early Experience, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Tzilla Elrad

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is evolving as an important step beyond existing software development approaches such as object-oriented development. An aspect is a module that captures a crosscutting concern, behavior that cuts across different units of abstraction in a software application; expressed as a module, such behavior can be enabled and disabled transparently and non-invasively, without changing the application code itself. Increasing industry demand for expertise in AOSD gives rise to the pedagogical challenge of covering this methodology and its foundations in the computer science curriculum. We present our curricular initiative to incorporate a novel course in AOSD in the …

A Multi-Platform Application Suite For Enhancing South Asian Language Pedagogy, Tao Bai, Christopher K. Chung, Konstantin Läufer, Daisy Rockwell, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This interdisciplinary project explores the potential for handheld/wireless (H/W) technology in the context of language education within and beyond the classroom. Specifically, we have designed and implemented a suite of multi-platform (desktop/laptop, handheld, and browser) applications to enhance the teaching of South Asian languages such as Hindi-Urdu. Such languages are very difficult to learn, let alone write, and H/W devices (with their handwriting/drawing capabilities) can play a significant role in overcoming the learning curve. The initial application suite includes a character/word tracer, a word splitter/joiner, a smart flashcard with audio, contextual augmented stories for reading comprehension, and a poetic metronome. …

The Extreme Software Development Series: An Open Curricular Framework For Applied Capstone Courses, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We describe an open, flexible curricular framework for offering a collection of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in software development. The courses offered within this framework are further unified by combining solid foundations with current technology and play the role of capstone courses in a modern software development track. Our initiative has been very successful with all stakeholders involved.

The Development, Design, And Theory Of Educational Interactive Multimedia Software, William James Chapman

Theses Digitization Project

This project provides teachers and students with background information regarding software design. Specifically it will focus on design theory including content, interface, graphics, animation, navigation, and audio issues which may arise during the design and construction of educational multimedia software. The design issues represented here are demonstrated in the software "You can make a difference ... Human Rights".

Electronic Testing System (Ets), Noor Ahmed Bashir Shamsul Anwar

Student Works (2000-2009)

The final year project is the qualification, which is required to complete the bachelor degree for all final year students of faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University Malaya. The purpose of this final year project is to expose students to the real working life of environment as well as getting experience in the real world project management. In this modern age of Information Technology, people are experiencing with the letter "E" which stands for Electronic. Such as, E-mail, E-commerce, E-government as well as E-test. The E-test stands for Electronic Testing, is a computer system, that can be applied …

Fsktm Database For Post Graduate Students (Pgsdb), H. Llazani Ardit

Student Works (2000-2009)

In this paper I categorize and explain the usage and the process of the construction, of FSKTM Database for post-graduate students, (PGSDB) a web based application. I explain the process in simple terms for the person who might not be familiar with the data. The paper begins with a introduction of the system to familiarize the reader with the role of the system and its objectives, then a review of the literature and an brief analysis of it gives an idea of what material was referred. The following sections explore in more details the components of the system and their …

Sistem Operasi Matriks, Mat Shaleh Muhammad Nazmi

Student Works (2000-2009)

Perkembangan teknologi serta pakej pembelajaran menggunakan komputer telah menyaksikan pembangunan teknologi komputer yang lebih drastik dan kompetetif. Projek ini dihasilkan akibat daripada peralihan kebanyakan sistem manual kepada secara berkomputer yang menyumbangkan lebih banyak kebaikan dan kemudahan kepada orang ramai. Projek ini merupakan suatu pakej pembelajaran yang berteraskan grafik dan juga beberapa ciri multimedia. Ia adalah khusus untuk pelajar-pelajar dan juga pengajarpengajar di peringkat sekolah menengah tinggi sehingga ke peringkat institut pengajian tinggi. Sistem ini adalah ramah pengguna dan mudah digunakan. Kajian ke atas sistem yang sedia ada amat penting dalam pengumpulan data bagi projek ini. Sistem ini akan dibangunkan dengan …

Sistem Test Bank, Jarkoni Mohammad Zam

Student Works (2000-2009)

Kajian ini dilakukan bagi memenuhi syarat bagi kursus WXET 3181 (Latihan Ilmiah I) di mana pelajar yang mengambil kursus ini dikehendaki menyiapkan satu kertas kerja bagi projek yang akan dibangunkan untuk WXET 3182 (Latihan Ilmiah II). Untuk tujuan itu saya telah memilih untuk menyiapkan satu cadangan kertas kerja bagi sistem Test Bank iaitu sistem untuk penyimpanan soalan-soalan peperiksaan bagi kursus-kursus yang ditawarkan oleh Fakulti Sains Komputer dan Teknologi Maklumat, Universiti Malaya. Sistem ini merupakan sistem berasaskan web dan berfungsi secara atas talian. Pengguna perlu memasukkan login id dan katalaluan bagi mendapat capaian ke dalam sistem. Ini dilakukan bagi memastikan keselamatan …

E-Learning: Introduction To Personal Computers, Ahmad Anwar

Student Works (2000-2009)

WXES3182 is the final year project which involves doing a thesis. The purpose of doing this thesis is to apply the techniques learned during classes. The Final result of the thesis is to produce complete software. To actually produce the software, a development process will have to be followed through. Here application of the development phases are put to use such as analysis, design and implementation. In the first part of the thesis WXES3182, development in started and carried through up until design phase. WXES3182 will continue the development process until the completed product is produces. Software developmet phases such …

Lecture On-Line/On-Demand, Siew Ping Foo

Student Works (2000-2009)

The on-line/on-demand lecture broadcasting is an ideal approach to meet the demand of effective and efficient communication for the fast growing web and multimedia technology. Thus, this project, the development of Lecture On-Line/On-Demand (LOL/LOD) broadcasting system provides the common functional components required for broadcasting both real time and not real time lectures. This will have resolved some existing education delivery bottlenecks such as time inconvenience, location dependence, space and tools limitation in the existing systems.Furthermore, there are viewer and administrator modules proposed for the LOL/LOD system. The viewer section allows the user to view, sort, search on-line or on-demand lectures …