Simon Dacey

An Intelligent Agent Based Land Encroachment Detection Approach

Land management and planning is essential to assist the economic growth, sustainable resource use and environmental protection of a city. This paper describes a novel approach to automatic encroachment detection to assist in land management decision making. The approach begins with training the agent to identify and understand the land cover/use features (such as buildings, parks, trees and roads) that are predominant in the region of interest, and carries out segmentation on the park data using the intelligent agent developed from the training samples. Experiments on park images from Auckland New Zealand show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Participatory land use management of public spaces in New Zealand

This paper summarises a literature review undertaken for a project to develop information visualisation of participatory land use management (PLUM) in New Zealand. No examples were found where information visualisation and/or a participatory approach had been used in the creation of a Land Management System (LMS) for New Zealand. However, some of the relevant participatory methods applied elsewhere have been integrated in this paper to develop a novel strategy for managing New Zealand parks and reserves.

Improving students’ performance through gamification : a user study

Lack of motivation is an issue for some learners. If they do not find the course materials engaging, they do not spend enough time to gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The term gamification is used to denote the application of game mechanisms in non-gaming environments with the objective of enhancing the process. Gamification has been shown to be an effective and motivating technique for enhancing students’ learning outcome. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based gamified tool (PeerWise) in enhancing tertiary students’ performance doing a Computer Science degree at Unitec Institute of Technology. PeerWise allows students to actively participate in a subject by authoring their own questions and answering, commenting on and rating other students’ questions. Results of an evaluation study conducted over 11 weeks (n = 180) showed that using the tool (both voluntary and compulsory) improved students’ performance and they found it valuable for their learning.

Designing a novel educational game for teaching C# programming

Learning to code can be a daunting experience for a lot of students. RunJumpCode is a novel 2D platformer video game, designed and developed in Unity, to teach players the fundamental concepts of C# programming. The game enhances the player’s programming knowledge by providing a fun range of challenges and puzzles to solve. We promoted the interaction of programming through a ‘Code Box’, allowing players to enter lines of predefined code that modifies in-game objects. This tool is essential in completing the challenges and puzzles we designed. To allow alterations of its properties, we made further manipulation of each object possible, which would give the player creative freedom to complete each level. Quizzes and journals were utilized to assess and collate their learnt material for future reference. In addition, we created a mobile application to track each player’s statistics throughout the game and compare their progress with other users. The results of a pilot study showed that users enjoyed playing the game and found it valuable for enhancing their programming knowledge.

Analysis and configuration of boundary difference calculations

In the field of land management, stakeholders (people) everywhere have many disputes over the location of boundaries between private land and public land. We find that the stakeholders disagree with each other over boundaries. We propose an approach that helps people to come to an agreement on position of boundaries (including pixel-based approach, polygon-based approach and middle boundary approach). The experiments are carried out on data relating to public parks in Auckland, New Zealand. The results of the experiments highlight the differences between different stakeholder’s percieved boundaries.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR MULTI-TENURE JURISDICTIONS

Technologies that are being developed according to the needs of a particular society depend largely on the level of skills, available materials, economy, requirements and cultural traits of that society. If such technologies are proved to work successfully within a given society, cultural differences may not allow those technologies to operate effectively in other societies. Therefore, when transferring a new technology cross‐culturally, several factors must be considered so that it is beneficial to the receiving societies. Land Information Systems have been developed to serve the growing needs of developed societies for complete, current and reliable information in a timely. They are also engaged to evaluate long‐term policies on land management combining economic, social and environmental issues. Faced with compelling arguments for the adoption of such technology in developed countries, it is tempting to simply translate and impose this experience on the situation in developing countries. The authors have been asked to develop an information system to assist Tongas Estate Holders (Nobles) in managing the countrys land under their care. Accordingly, in endeavouring to explore ways in which the tools and techniques offered by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be used to collect, use and preserve relevant information about lands which are still held under various customary land tenure systems this paper presents a brief overview of culture, land tenure, Land Information Systems (LIS) development and proposes an extension to the classical LIS development models in order that information about customary held lands is dealt with effectively.