Camilo Jiménez

Developing programming skills by using interactive learning objects

After several years of teaching programming using an active learning approach, we present our Interactive Learning Objects (ILOs) as one of the components that reinforce our pedagogical model, by supporting the generation of high-level programming skills. In this paper, we suggest a multi-dimension taxonomy for ILOs and present the experimentation developed to evaluate the impact of these objects within our CS courses

Extensibility in Model-Based Business Process Engines

An organization’s ability to embrace change, greatly depends on systems that support their operation. Specifically, process engines might facilitate or hinder changes, depending on their flexibility, their extensibility and the changes required: current workflow engine characteristics create difficulties in organizations that need to incorporate some types of modifications. In this paper we present Cumbia, an extensible MDE platform to support the development of flexible and extensible process engines. In a Cumbia process, models represent participating concerns (control, resources, etc.), which are described with concern-specific languages. Cumbia models are executed in a coordinated way, using extensible engines specialized for each concern.

A scalable and incremental project-based learning approach for CS1/CS2 courses

Cupi2 is a project that promotes an integral solution to problems in teaching/learning programming using a large and structured courseware, and a student-centered pedagogical model (Villalobos and Casallas 2006a; Villalobos et al. 2009a, b; Jiménez and Villalobos 2010). As a cornerstone of Cupi2, we use incremental projects intended to motivate students, and to develop high-level programming skills throughout their learning. A critical factor of these projects is that they are specially designed so that students are engaged in activities that complete a scaffold of a complete program. However, both the scaffolds and the activities needed to complete these incomplete programs must be arranged carefully by instructors in order to stress the adequate contents for students, and at the same time, to help those students acquire programming skills effectively. Jointly, scaffold versions need to comply with high quality standards, representing a high time consuming activity for instructors, and therefore, increased costs for institutions. In this paper, we describe the way we overcome these challenges using a software factory that supports the projects’ design in a scalable way.

Construction of a Flexible Data Structures Laboratory

A video processing system is disclosed having a store (1) into which video signals, in the form of a sequence of pixels, are written into and read out of in response to common fixed clocking pulses, although the input video signal is synchronized independently of the output video signal. The phase of the pixels at the input to the store, and also the phase of the line and field synchronizing pulses, is adjusted to correct sub pixel phase error between input and output so that the common pixel clocking pulses can be used thereby substantially reducing cross talk between the input and output signals.