Jay Burmeister

Teaching programming to beginners - choosing the language is just the first step

Over the years there has been an ongoing debate about which computer language to adopt for a first programming subject. Although some may not agree, the current consensus is that the object-oriented languages are winning the argument, and Java has increasingly become the language of choice for teaching beginners. But choosing the language is only the first step in designing a first programming subject. The adoption of an object-oriented language such as Java offers an opportunity to completely rethink our approach to teaching first-year programming, an opportunity that should not be missed. In this paper we identify what we see as the non language-specific core issues, and discuss how we approached these issues when designing and teaching a programming subject for beginners.

Ubiquitous travel service delivery.

Free independent travelers require flexible, reactive service delivery due to their regularly changing location and activities and the lack of a wired Internet connection. A ubiquitous travel service delivery system that is able to dynamically deliver services in response to relevant events, such as changing location, availability of new last-minute specials, work opportunities, and safety issues can provide added value while retaining the flexibility that is so important to independent travelers. This article describes such a system. An engineering design research approach has been adopted to design the system. Issues addressed include traveler and service states and events, contexts, situations, and situation-action rules. An architecture is proposed that is based on distributed, cooperating software agents and mobile data technologies. The role of these agents is to continuously monitor situations that are occurring in the physical and virtual service spaces and to take the required action for any situations that are relevant to the traveler.

On relating local and global factors: a case study from the game of Go

Traditional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to programming the game of Go are based on the translation of local information (modelled by pattern recognition processes) to global symbolic form (modelled by rule-based systems) for access by symbolic reasoning processes. We explore the converse process, seeking to relate local and global factors by integrating global factors into a local representation which can then be accessed by symbolic reasoning processes. We demonstrate one method for such an integration, the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing. The algorithm we use in our simulation integrates global factors by directly modifying the numeric information contained in the local representation of the board. We use Go as an example of a domain with the characteristic that local and global factors cannot be identified independently of each other. Thus, to form a representation of a Go board requires an interaction between bottom-up processing (to identify local factors) and top-down processing (to identify global factors). In the final section we briefly relate these constraints to other domains.