Julián Moreno-Cadavid

Proposal of a gamified virtual learning environment for computer programming courses

Many computer science teachers would agree that programming is as much science as it is art. Therefore, a lot of practice is needed to become a good programmer. Within this context, we present in this paper a virtual learning environment called TICademia, which is based on two main approaches: gamification on one side, and competitive programming on the other. We describe its main features and present a brief comparison with several existing alternatives.

College induction through an online multiplayer game

Induction is a common process for first year students in most colleges. What we present in this paper is an alternative for doing such a process using a novel approach: an online multiplayer game. We covered all the issues that are generally provided in traditional process but with a clear purpose, that students feel more motivated and engaged. Besides a full description of the induction course, we also present here a validation in a Colombian University with 563 students. The students said that the game is user friendly, and is more effective that the face-to-face induction. The obtained results demonstrated the potential of this alternative.

Big Data: una exploración de investigaciones, tecnologías y casos de aplicación

Big Data has become a worldwide trend and although still lacks a scientific or academic consensual concept, every day it portends greater market growth that surrounds and the associated research areas. This paper reports a systematic review of the literature on Big Data considering a state of the art about techniques and technologies associated with Big Data, which include capture, processing, analysis and data visualization. The characteristics, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for some applications and Big Data models that include support mainly for modeling, analysis, and data mining are explored. Likewise, some of the future trends for the development of Big Data are introduced by basic aspects, scope, and importance of each one. The methodology used for exploration involves the application of two strategies, the first corresponds to a scientometric analysis and the second corresponds to a categorization of documents through a web tool to support the process of literature review. As results, a summary and conclusions about the subject are generated and possible scenarios arise for research work in the field.

Una Aproximación Multi-Agente para el Soporte al Proceso de Extracción-Transformación-Carga en Bodegas de Datos

In order to provide an adequate solution in terms of robustness and automation in the process of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) in data warehouses, in this article a multi-agent model that gathers the strengths of other approaches like wrappers and ad-hoc solutions is presented. Such a model considers the heterogeneity and availability of the data sources as well as their distributed nature. For its validation an experiment was performed using simulated and real data, which demonstrated not only its technical feasibility but also its effectiveness in terms of the percentage of processed data and the time to accomplish it.

Búsquedas desde una Federación de Repositorios de Objetos de Aprendizaje: Una Evaluación Experimental

En este articulo se presenta la evaluacion de la eficiencia de las bus-quedas sobre una federacion de repositorios de objetos de aprendizaje, en particular la Federacao de Repositorios Educa Brasil – FEB, respecto a la velocidad de respuesta y cantidad de registros recuperados. El objetivo es determinar las bondades de esta arquitectura en las busquedas centrali-zadas sobre recursos distribuidos, pensando en un futuro cercano en realizar una implementacion similar para Colombia. Tal evaluacion se llevo a cabo mediante un experimento, usando 10 terminos de busqueda del campo de la salud, y se hizo una comparacion entre FEB y dos reposi-torios reconocidos: MERLOT y The Gateway. Para no tener sesgos respec-to a los momentos y origenes de las busquedas, estas se realizaron 30 veces, cada una desde 3 ubicaciones diferentes: Brasil, Colombia y Espa-na. Los resultados obtenidos demostraron un menor tiempo promedio de respuesta estadisticamente significante comparado con MERLOT (valor P < 0,001), pero mayor comparado con The Gateway (valor P < 0,001). Finalmente, se evidencio un crecimiento constante de la cantidad de objetos de aprendizaje registrados en FEB durante los ultimos dos anos