Lone Leth Thomsen

SmartCampusAAU -- An Open Platform Enabling Indoor Positioning and Navigation

This paper describes SmartCampusAAU - an open, extendable platform that supports the easy creation of indoor location based systems. SmartCampusAAU offers an app and backend that can be used to enable indoor positioning and navigation in any building. The SmartCampusAAU app is available on all major mobile platforms (Android, iPhone and Windows Phone) and supports both device- and infrastructure-based positioning. SmartCampusAAU also offers a publicly available OData backend that allows researchers to share radio map and location tracking data.

Assessing Problem-Based Learning in a Software Engineering Curriculum Using Bloom’s Taxonomy and the IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has often been seen as an all-or-nothing approach, difficult to apply in traditional curricula based on traditional lectured courses with exercise and lab sessions. Aalborg University has since its creation in 1974 practiced PBL in all subjects, including computer science and software engineering, following a model that has become known as the Aalborg Model. Following a strategic decision in 2009, the Aalborg Model has been reshaped. We first report on the software engineering program as it was in the old Aalborg Model. We analyze the programme wrt competence levels according to Bloom’s taxonomy and compare it with the expected skills and competencies for an engineer passing a general software engineering 4-year program with an additional 4 years of experience as defined in the IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) [Abran et al. 2004]. We also compare with the Graduate Software Engineering 2009 Curriculum Guidelines for Graduate Degree Programmes in Software Engineering (GSwE2009) [Pyster 2009]. We then describe the new curriculum and draw some preliminary conclusions based on analyzing the curriculum according to Bloom’s taxonomy and the results of running the program for 2 years. As the new program is structured to be compliant with the Bologna Process and thus presents all activities in multipla of 5 European Credit Transfer System points, we envision that elements of the program could be used in more traditional curricula. This should be especially easy for programs also complying with the Bologna Process.

Computational Abstraction Steps

In this paper we discuss computational abstraction steps as a way to create class abstractions from concrete objects, and from examples. Computational abstraction steps are regarded as symmetric counterparts to computational concretisation steps, which are well-known in terms of function calls and class instantiations. Our teaching experience shows that many novice programmers find it dicult to write programs with abstractions that materialise to concrete objects later in the development process. The contribution of this paper is the idea of initiating a pro- gramming process by creating or capturing concrete values, objects, or actions. As the next step, some of these are lifted to a higher level by computational means. In the object-oriented paradigm the target of such steps is classes. We hypothesise that the proposed approach primarily will be beneficial to novice programmers or during the exploratory phase of a program development process. In some specific niches it is also expected that our approach will benefit professional programmers.

Mini Project Programming Exams

A number of different types of final programming exams used or considered at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, are identified and analyzed. Based on this analysis, a new type of programming exam is introduced called a Mini Project Programming (MIP) exam. MIP is a group-based programming assignment that is intended as a medium-scale programming effort followed by a final oral exam. MIP is characterized and compared to existing types of final programming exams by use of a number of independent criteria. The chapter motivates the MIP approach and reports on our experience over four years. The MIP exam is a compromise between (1) a long problem-based project exam and (2) a short oral or written programming exam. It is concluded that the strengths of MIP are the high degree of realism in the exam assignment and comprehensiveness relative to the course syllabus. The main challenge of MIP is how to detect fraud.

Object-oriented programming with gradual abstraction

We describe an experimental object-oriented programming language, ASL2, that supports program development by means of a series of abstraction steps. The language allows immediate object construction, and it is possible to use the constructed objects for concrete problem solving tasks. Classes and class hierarchies can be derived from the objects - via gradual abstraction steps. We introduce two levels of object classification, called weak and strong object classification. Strong object classification relies on conventional classes, whereas weak object classification is looser, and less restrictive. As a central mechanism, weakly classified objects are allowed to borrow methods from each other. ASL2 supports class generalization, as a counterpart to class specialization and inheritance in mainstream object-oriented programming languages. The final abstraction step discussed in this paper is a syntactical abstraction step that derives a source file with a syntactical class form.