Blaine A. Price

Wearables: has the age of smartwatches finally arrived?

ful campaigns in the history of crowd funding at the time.a The Pebble story is evidence of a huge market demand for such technology. Generator research predicts this market will grow to 214 million units by 2018. The Pebble is not the first modern smartwatch; it was preceded by Sony’s SmartWatch. However, because Sony’s device relied on its Bluetooth connection to act as a complementary interface to compatible Sony smartphones, the Pebble could be considered the first fully independent smartwatch. Large-scale consumer electronics manufacturers have begun to release their own smartwatches or define specifications for their future smartwatches.

Using Robotics to Motivate ‘Back Door’ Learning

This paper suggests that robotics can provide a vehicle for guiding primary and secondary school children toward an effective understanding of programming and engineering principles. It observes that children find robotics stimulating and motivating, and that their interest in, and focus on, ‘making the robot do what I want’ leads them ‘via the back door’ to learn about programming and engineering in a way that is both well-grounded and generaliseable.These observations arise from empirical studies of children participating in robotics competitions: we conducted observations and interviews with all the participating teams at two robotics events (one regional, one international), and we followed one young robotics team in a case study. The children had almost all built their robots using LEGO MindStorms for specific competitions, with soccer, rescue and dance events. The children typically worked in teams, building robots as an extra-curricular activity supported by a teacher/mentor. The children came from a variety of educational and social backgrounds.The paper considers what makes robotics motivating to children, including children who are not considered ‘technically oriented’. It describes learning that has emerged from childrens experiences in building and programming robots. It describes examples of children learning subjects that they previously considered difficult and inaccessible, in order to solve problems in robotics. It describes examples of children identifying and understanding principles, concepts, and elements of practice that are fundamental to programming and engineering. It describes further how secondary school students working in teams learned that this programming and engineering knowledge has a social context.

A holistic approach to supporting distance learning using the Internet: transformation, nottranslation

This is the first of a series of papers describing how the Open University, a large distance education institution, has embraced the Internet as a medium for supporting its students, tutors, academics, and administrators throughout the education process. This paper reports on a holistic approach to integrating technology into the teaching process which addresses how to provide necessary functions in effective forms—some traditional, some new. It describes the development and structure of actual systems, which incorporate electronic student registration; electronic assignment submission, marking, and recording; electronic tutorials and other interaction; and electronic examinations. It describes and summarises some of the findings of the evaluation of those systems, including student, academic, and administrator feedback. Finally, this paper reflects on the benefits of an integrated holistic approach in exploiting the Internets potential to support distance learning on a massive scale. Subsequent papers in this series will address specific areas in detail:the student experience, the role of the tutor in an electronic environment, and the institutional perspective.

From spaces to places: emerging contexts in mobile privacy

Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a diversified approach, enabling the cross-interpretation of data from complementary methods. However, mobility imposes a number of limitations on the methods that can be effectively employed. We discuss how we addressed this problem in an empirical study of mobile social networking. We report on how, by combining a variation of experience sampling and contextual interviews, we have started focusing on a notion of context in relation to privacy, which is subjectively defined by emerging socio-cultural knowledge, functions, relations and rules. With reference to Gieryns sociological work, we call this place, as opposed to a notion of context that is objectively defined by physical and factual elements, which we call space. We propose that the former better describes the context for mobile privacy.

Teaching programming through paperless assignments: an empirical evaluation of instructor feedback

This paper considers how facilities afforded by electronic assignment handling can contribute to the quality of Internet-based teaching of programming. It reports a study comparing the nature, form, and quality of feedback provided by instructors on 90 paper and electronic assignments in an introductory Computing course and notes effective strategies for electronic marking.

Remote electronic examinations: student experiences

This paper presents the findings from a small–scale experiment investigating the presentation of a synchronous remote electronic examination. It discusses the students’ experiences of taking such an examination. The study confirms that the majority of participants found the experience at least as good as a conventional written examination. In addition, typing answers does not prevent students from producing answers in the time available. However, the pressure of time continues to be a major cause of anxiety for students. The paper discusses technical issues, particularly those related to the loss of communications during the 3–hour duration of the exam. Although software processes were available to save and restore students’ answers throughout the examination, problems still occurred and more robust software is required.

A framework for describing and implementing software visualization systems

In recent years many prototype systems have been developed for graphically visualizing program execution in an attempt to create a better interface between software engineers and their programs. Several classification-based taxonomies have been proposed to describe visualization systems and several general frameworks have been proposed for implementing such systems. In this chapter we provide a framework for both describing existing systems and implementing new ones. We demonstrate the utility of automatic program visualization by re-implementing several existing programming language visualization systems using this framework.

What is the best programming environment/language for teaching robotics using Lego Mindstorms?

We are in the process of producing a range of eductional materials to teach robotics to a variety of audiences using the LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System. We briefly review the programming environments currently available, and consider how appropriate they are for each of our candidate audiences. There is the usual trade-off between ease of use and power. It is suggested that no single programming environment is suitable for all audiences. Instead, aprogression of environments from microworlds, through graphical programming environments, to textual languages seems to provide the best way to develop our teaching.

Distilling privacy requirements for mobile applications

As mobile computing applications have become commonplace, it is increasingly important for them to address end-users’ privacy requirements. Privacy requirements depend on a number of contextual socio-cultural factors to which mobility adds another level of contextual variation. However, traditional requirements elicitation methods do not sufficiently account for contextual factors and therefore cannot be used effectively to represent and analyse the privacy requirements of mobile end users. On the other hand, methods that do investigate contextual factors tend to produce data that does not lend itself to the process of requirements extraction. To address this problem we have developed a Privacy Requirements Distillation approach that employs a problem analysis framework to extract and refine privacy requirements for mobile applications from raw data gathered through empirical studies involving end users. Our approach introduces privacy facets that capture patterns of privacy concerns which are matched against the raw data. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach using qualitative data from an empirical study of a mobile social networking application.

Software visualization as a pedagogical tool

The teaching of computer programming can benefit from looking ahead towards the needs of experienced programmers, who routinely use ‘industrial strength’ programming environments. Two of the main attributes of such environments are (a) their ability to scale up to handle large examples and (b) the way they facilitate visualization of program execution. We describe our approach to software visualization, a collection of techniques which allows beginners to see the innards of program execution clearly and at the same time allows experts to view high level program abstractions which help them home in quickly on buggy code. This approach can be combined with recent developments in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and has the added benefit of allowing students to explore on their own using a discovery-based paradigm. Were-work some well known examples from the ITS community and show how our approach scales up to handle a more sophisticated problem involving a 7,500 line operating system.