Asmaa Alsumait

Creative and innovative e‐learning using interactive storytelling

Purpose – Interactive storytelling is a powerful tool for improving childrens development of essential skills and general knowledge. As an informal learning method, interactive storytelling provides life experience and promotes the use of vocabulary and communication skills. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a storytelling tool was developed to help kindergarteners create stories. This tool included an instrument used to measure four characteristics of four‐ to five‐year‐old children: general knowledge, creativity, self‐confidence and between the children and the technology to assess a childs progress. Moreover, there is a pressing need to better understand and improve upon this educational innovation. Therefore, this paper proposed the child interactive storytelling (CIS) framework.Findings – The developed interactive storytelling tool helped instructors as well as parents to perceive the childs progress through multiple use of the tool. Experiments in...

Social network privacy and trust concerns

Social Network Sites (SNS) developed to provide means of interaction and/or data sharing between multiple users. The study of online SNS privacy and trust management has few empirical studies and needs to be examined in greater depth. This pilot study evaluates the privacy aspects, trust concerns, and attitudes of young Kuwaiti social network users as well as assesses how these behaviors map against privacy vulnerabilities inherent to social networking applications. This study employed a survey with 222 participants, examining five areas: social network usage, literacy, youth social behavior, and both privacy and trust concerns.

Usability heuristics evaluation for child e-learning applications

Heuristic evaluation has become widely accepted method of usability evaluation in software development. This paper introduces Heuristic Evaluation for Child E-learning applications (HECE), a comprehensive set of heuristics for child e-learning along with a detailed explanation for the usability experts on how to apply them. These sets of heuristics are based on Nielsens original ten heuristic developed for software. Nielson heuristics are basically generic, and might not encompass usability attributes specific to children or e-learning. The new HECE set would overcome these shortcomings. The validity and effectiveness of these heuristics were evaluated against two developed e-learning programs designed by ReDSOFT for KG-2 and special need students. The results indicated that HECE identified qualitative similarities and differences with user testing, and that HECE is best suited for evaluating general and child usability. Combined with user testing, HECE offers a new track that can assist in guiding the child e-learning industry to design applications that are both educational and pleasurable for children.

A digital storytelling tool for Arab children

In this study, we implemented a storytelling tool to help teachers and parents evaluate and improve the communication skills of 4-to 5-year-old Arab children. The purpose of this tool was to create effective multimedia learning software with various interactive features to provide children with new opportunities to improve their communication skills. This tool helps teachers and parents to measure four characteristics of students and children: general knowledge, creativity, self-confidence, and interactions between children and technology. The storytelling tool was implemented on the iPad and was tested with children between the ages of 4 and 5 years of age from private and public kindergarten schools. Data sources used in this study include questionnaire, interview content, observational notes, and time records while a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches was employed for analyzing the data. The results showed that there was a slight difference between 4- and 5-year-old children; in particular, 4-year-old children were more self-confident, creative, and interactive than 5-year-olds. The results for boys and girls were sufficiently similar that the gender differences were negligible.

Improving literacy for deaf Arab children using interactive storytelling

Initial contact with Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) for most deaf Arab children occurs in elementary school. These children face challenges in making a meaningful connection between ArSL and spoken and written Arabic, and this further affects their overall language development. This ongoing research addresses how an e-learning tool such as storytelling can be used as an instructional reading program in the classroom to enhance literacy learning and communication skills for deaf Arab children. Our aim is to create an effective storytelling tool with various interactive features that would provide deaf children with new opportunities to improve their literacy and communication skills. We believe that an informal learning method such as storytelling provides life experiences and promotes the use of vocabulary and communication skills. The proposed interactive storytelling program will enable teachers to help deaf children learn to create their own narratives and improve their essential skills and general knowledge.

Continuous memory allocation model for cloud services

Cloud computing has been growing at a staggering rate by offering a flexible and financially attractive venue for businesses and consumers. Within this context, memory allocation has a significant bearing on cloud-based services. Currently, all major cloud service providers support a small set of discrete memory sizes. We propose a cloud computing service that advertises continuous (any) memory request size, while actually supporting a small number of quantized memory sizes. This scheme redefines and transforms the manner in which cloud services are offered to the public by simplifying the ever-increasing level of pricing complexity. Our proposal targets the root causes of complexity. A service provider with a continuous service model will have a distinct advantage over the competition. We utilize mathematical algorithms to quantize and map the continuous (any) memory request sizes into a small number of quantized sizes optimally, with minimal loss. Furthermore, we investigate different factors affecting the continuous model, such as worth structure, size request distribution, total memory size, and granularity. A simulation is used to conduct our study and confirm our findings.

Usability requirements for COTS based systems

Component-based software development (CBSD) aims at building software systems by searching, selecting and integrating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The effective selection of COTS components that meet the users requirements and expectations is a non-trivial task. Many published papers consider functional requirements while ignoring usability requirements. In this paper, we have proposed a selection process approach (SPA), which allows an effective selection of the COTS components while minimizing the cost and assuring the satisfaction of hardware, software and user usability requirements. SPA includes requirement solver (RS), an automated tool to assess requirement engineers to select components that creates a functioning computer system. RS optimizes the solution using Simulated Annealing (SA) to search the design space to match, rank, select and integrate COTS components with a maximal satisfaction while neither exceeding a given budget nor violating user and performance constraints. Our computational results based on building a computer for a child handwriting e-learning application show feasibility of SPA in finding solution satisfying all constraints while reducing the cost by 58%.

SPACots: A Software Tool for Selecting COTS Components

This paper presents a software tool for integrating a child-friendly computer system based on commercial off-the-shelf COTS components. The effective selection of COTS components, which meet a childs requirements and expectations, is a non-trivial and challenging optimization problem. However, many published papers consider the functional requirements while ignoring usability requirements. The functional requirements are concerned with what the computer should be able to do, whereas the usability requirements are concerned with the extent to which the child is able to learn effectively and efficiently throughout the COTS based computer. In this paper, the authors propose an iterative five-task selection and integration of COTS process, including both hardware devices and software modules, to be automated. The core of the automated tool is employing Simulated Annealing SA to search the design space to match, select, and integrate COTS components with a maximal satisfaction while neither exceeding a given budget nor violating child and performance constraints. A Monte Carlo simulator was utilized to evaluate the goodness of the COTS based computer design. Computational results based on building a computer for a child handwriting e-learning application show feasibility of SPACots in finding a solution satisfying all constraints while reducing the cost by 58%.