William L. Honig

IN rollout in the United States

Individual perspectives on advanced intelligent network (AIN) implementation are presented from four regional companies in the Unites States: Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Ameritech, and US WEST. These perspectives range from trial to deployment activities and address a range of capabilities supported by the AIN architecture. AIN participation by all regional companies in the United States is summarized.<<ETX>>

A classroom outsourcing experience for software engineering learning

Outsourcing of software development is a key part of globalization, oft misunderstood by computer science students, and possibly a cause of declining enrollments in the field. The authors developed and implemented an outsourcing experience for students in an advanced software engineering course. Student teams at two universities developed game playing programs and outsourced key parts of their systems to the other university. Results show students improved their understanding of outsourcing, developed better appreciation for the importance of software engineering techniques, and created ad hoc communication protocols between teams. The paper concludes with recommendations for expanding the approach used to other universities to create a more inclusive computer science and software engineering teaching environment.

Teaching and assessing programming fundamentals for non majors with visual programming

Visual programming tools and mobile device applications are a natural tool to engage university students; but, are they effective in teaching quantitative thinking skills to non computer science majors? Answering this question can be based on careful assessment of the learning outcomes. This paper reports the results from teaching over 100 students mobile app development with App Inventor in a university core course. Results were measured using an assessment process motivated by Blooms Taxonomy that included student self assessment, ratings by instructors, and comparisons of the two results. The categories in the assessment were mapped to specific levels of skills with various App Inventor components. Results presented here confirm App Inventors effectiveness and ability to motivate students. App Inventor features and components that most impacted the student learning are noted. The assessment results show the course was very successful particularly in the three assessment categories of Remembering, Understanding, and Application (Lower Order Thinking Skills) and acceptably successful in Analysis, Evaluating, and Creating (Higher Order Thinking Skills). The paper concludes with suggestions on continued improvement of the course content and additional App Inventor features that should become part of the assessment process.

Intelligent systems development in a non engineering curriculum

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software. How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any but the larger engineering oriented universities, and hard to fit into a typical length course. The course described here is a solution using microcontroller programming in high level language, small hardware components, and the Arduino open source microcontroller. The results of the hands-on course show that student programmers with limited hardware knowledge are able to build custom devices, handle the complexity of basic hardware design, and learn to appreciate the differences between large and small scale programming.

Bringing data base technology to the programmer

This paper reports work toward melding some ideas from data base management with currently popular views of structured programming. The basic idea is to allow all data structures used inside programs (instead of just those in an external data base) to be described at multiple conceptual levels by a separate definition. This approach brings to programmers the benefits of data independence and also allows structured programming to have its hitherto unrealized full effect on data.

A framework architecture for student learning in distributed embedded systems

Academic courses focused on individual microcomputers or client/server applications are no longer sufficient for students to develop knowledge in embedded systems. Current and near-term industrial systems employ multiple interacting components and new network and security approaches; hence, academic preparation requires teaching students to develop realistic projects comparable to these real-world products. However, the complexity, breadth, and technical variations of these real-world products are difficult to reproduce in the classroom. This paper outlines preliminary work on a framework architecture suitable for academic teaching of modern embedded systems including the Internet of Things. It defines four layers, two of which are at the edges of the network, and not adequately covered in academia. For each layer of the architecture, specific technology and suitable devices are identified. Desired academic outcomes for courses using projects based on the architecture are identified. Feedback and comparison is sought on how effective student course and research activities based on the framework will be to real-world embedded systems developers.