Judy Brown

Supporting and evaluating team dynamics in group projects

Computer science students benefit from working in teams. But working in teams is difficult and team skills are seldom taught. In this paper, we describe mechanisms we put in place for supporting team processes in our group project course. We evaluate the mechanisms and extract guidelines that are useful for supporting team dynamics.

The Vista environment for the coevolutionary design of user interfaces

User centered design requires the creation of numerous design artifacts such as task hierarchy, task-oriented specification, user interface design, architecture design and code. It is increasingly accepted that such artifacts cannot be created in isolation, but instead incrementally coevolve, where information obtained from the development of one artifact contributes to the development of the others. In user interface development, these artifacts are typically developed by different people with different backgrounds, hindering the communication necessary for coevolution. This paper demonstrates how different design artifacts can be linked, exposing their common elements. Such links can be developed despite the differing points of view and differing levels of detail of the design artifacts. This paper describes Vista, a prototype tool for examining the links between design artifacts, and demonstrates how making these links explicit supports coevolutionary design.

Women in introductory computer science: experience at Victoria University of Wellington

This paper documents efforts that the department has made to support women students between 1991 and the 1996. Our major goal has been to reduce the high withdrawal rate of women students in our entry level course in computer science. We describe the approaches that have been taken to address this concern, and present the data which has been collected to track the results of our efforts. Our data suggests that providing a gender neutral content is not enough to ensure that men and women will retain similarly. In this paper we suggest policies which we feel may be beneficial in achieving similar male and female retention rates.

Software engineers aren't born in teams: supporting team processes in software engineering project courses

In the Computer Science programme at Victoria University of Wellington, we teach two 3rd year software engineering courses. The first course teaches software engineering principles. The second course is a project course in which students are expected to work in teams. This year, we provided more support for team processes in the project course. We describe the mechanisms that we use to support the team process and summarize the results of a survey that evaluated the mechanisms. The survey, which was administered at the mid-point of the course, indicates that at that time our mechanisms to support team processes appear to be working well.

Designing better online teaching material

The creation of excellent online teaching material is challenging because it requires that designers are able to apply learning theories and usability principles. In this paper we describe a web-based tutorial we developed to teach database students about SQL-like operators that can be used to access data in data warehouses (very large collections of data used by analysts). This paper describes the processes and methods used to develop the tutorial and the techniques we used to test prototypes of our tutorial. We show how ideas from user-centered design and learning theory can be usefully combined to create a new process for developing online teaching material that meets learning and usability aims.

Evaluation of the task-action grammar method for assessing learnability in user interface software

Many approaches to evaluation of user interfaces in HCI exist. Most methodologies evaluate prototypes through user testing. Since user testing is expensive and time consuming, other methods are sometimes applied before user testing. These other approaches aim to identify problems through expert evaluation techniques. In this paper we present a novel use of the TAG (Task-Action Grammar) method as an evaluation tool to identify learnability problems in a interface prior to user testing. We find that the TAG assessment method revealed problems related to inconsistency and conceptual complexity in a design.

Visualisations of parallel algorithms for reconfigurable torus computers

Program visualisation can help make an algorithm understandable. Program visualisation is especially challenging in the area of parallel computations where many processors are executing simultaneously. Algorithms for parallel machines take advantage of the simultaneous activity of processors to perform operations very quickly. As a result, these algorithms can be difficult to understand. We describe a visualisation tool developed specifically for explaining algorithms written for single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) computers called torus computers. This tool helps its users to visualise the patterns of activities of the processors in the process of a computation.

Extending the value of prototypes with Panorama a tool to browse software artefacts

This paper reviews the value of prototypes and proposes a tool called Panorama that links prototypes with other artefacts created during the software development process. The artefacts we consider have been created by either HCI specialists or software engineers during software development. Panorama facilitates the sharing of artefacts and aims to increase the quality of communication between software engineers and HCI specialists throughout the development and maintenance phases. We look at a variety of prototypes created by HCI specialists including static prototypes (bitmaps of sketches, screen dumps, and digital photographs) and dynamic prototypes (derived from UIML specifications). We investigate the value and feasibility of creating links between these prototypes and other design artefacts.

Visualisation for learning OOP, using AOP and eclipse

This paper outlines our project to help beginners learn to program by showing object visualisations driven by aspect- oriented programming, and presented as part of the Eclipse development platform. The aspect-oriented programming is part of the infrastructure we use to drive the visualisations that help students learn object-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented programming explicitly supports the kind of cross-cutting concerns that allows our system to drive visualisations that emphasise principles of object interaction. Our extensions to Eclipse allow us to provide this educational scaffolding to help learners, without altering the program, the programming language or the libraries.

Towards a General Model for Assisting Navigation

In this paper, we review the principles of navigation, present a general model for supporting navigation in user interface design, and show examples of how the model can be applied. The model has four different properties along which navigational scenarios can be classified. These are: dimensionality, freedom of movement, presentation and reinforcement. We show how use of the model leads to heuristics to help in the design and evaluation of user interfaces that include navigational aspects.