Yasushi Kuno

Dolittle - experiences in teaching programming at K12 schools

The Japanese government has been promoting IT education, including programming, at elementary and secondary (K12) schools since 2002. We have developed Dolittle, an object-oriented programming language suitable for K12 education, and evaluated it through the teaching opportunities available in classrooms. This work describes the outline and the future outlook of Dolittle, and reports on the examples of how it is used in classes.

Proposal for Teaching Manufacturing and Control Programming Using Autonomous Mobile Robots with an Arm

We propose a technology education curriculum for lower secondary school students using an autonomous mobile robot with an arm. The purpose of our curriculum is to teach the concept of systems that work with mechanics, electricity and computers. For this purpose, we have developed a control board and a computer language for an autonomous mobile robot with an arm. The benefit of this kind of robot is that students have to seriously think about the program for controlling the arm to lift and carry objects. This kind of serious thought is not necessary in programming simple mobile robots without arms[1]. In this paper, we will report a test conducted to evaluate our teaching materials and lessons in lower secondary school. As a result, our technology education curriculum satisfies requirements for students that have more incentives to learn the concept of systems.

Business game development toolkit for the WWW environment

This paper proposes a novel toolkit for educating business people through home-made simulator development. The toolkit is used at our business simulation course. The course consists of (i) Simple gaming experiment among multiple students using Alexander Islands, a tiny business simulator on the WWW; (ii) Lectures to let students to understand the core concepts of systems management through the simulation; and (iii) Home-made simulation model development by the students themselves using the toolkit, which equips a business model description language (BMDL) and a business model development system (BMDS), This paper describes the background and basic principles, the architecture and of BMDL/BMDS, and evaluation results.

Coverage Estimation in Model Checking with Bitstate Hashing

Explicit-state model checking which is conducted by state space search has difficulty in exploring satisfactory state space because of its memory requirements. Though bitstate hashing achieves memory efficiency, it cannot guarantee complete verification. Thus, it is desirable to provide a reliability indicator such as a coverage estimate. However, the existing approaches for coverage estimation are not very accurate when a verification run covers a small portion of state space. This mainly stems from the lack of information that reflects characteristics of models. Therefore, we propose coverage estimation methods using a growth curve that approximates an increase in reached states by enlarging a bloom filter. Our approaches improve estimation accuracy by leveraging the statistics from multiple verification runs. Coverage is estimated by fitting the growth curve to these statistics. Experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed growth curve and the applicability of our approaches to practical models. In fact, for practical models, our approaches outperformed the conventional ones when the actual coverage is relatively low.

Multilingual Programming Language Environments for Intercultural Collaboration of Programming Education in K-12

This article is chiefly concerned with multilingual programming language and system for collaboration of programming education in K-12. For a programming language to become a multilingual, it could be programmed in a manner independent on any locale. And this locale independent resource files can be easily translated into a new locale. Therefore when a multilingual programming language for K-12 is designed, it should have no keywords that have a particular meaning to the programming language. In addition, it specifies a set of characters which are based on Unicode character instead of a single character. Dolittle as a both multilingual and educational programming language has all kinds of features described above. Especially, it supports translation server for interculture collaboration between Korea and Japan to teach and learn programming education in K-12. We also conducted experimental lesson to evaluate the effectiveness of Dolittles inflected dictionary in Korea. It was found from the result of the experimental lesson that using inflected dictionary of identifiers can decrease overall error ratio in comparison with using only one identifier.

Join token: A language mechanism for programming interactive games

Abstract In the video game software industry, scripting languages have been used to alleviate the complexity of game development. Much of this complexity resides in managing game characters’ multiple concurrent activities. However, current scripting languages seem to lack support for interactions among multiple concurrent activities in a state-dependent manner. To overcome this problem, we propose a mechanism called “join token” in which the states of game characters can be expressed as tokens and interactions can be described as handlers involving multiple tokens. For the purpose of evaluation, we have developed a game scripting language called “Mogemoge”, and we have written several sample games in this language. In this paper, we explain the join token, the design/implementation of Mogemoge, and its evaluation through a sample game.

A parallel computation Model and programming language for the description of collaboration among objects

Several parallel computation models including the Actor Model have been proposed. Since these models have only primitive constructs for parallel computation, it is not easy to build a model in terms of what kind of roles objects in the real world play and how they collaborate with each other. When we create a parallel system model with such frameworks, it is difficult to understand the system behavior as a whole. To solve this problem, we propose a new model, the Producer Model, and its description language Produce/1. In the Producer Model, parallel objects collaborate with each other under the coordination of producer objects. In the Actor Model, objects build network topologies and send messages to each other. On the other hand, in the Producer Model, we distinguish these two kinds of computations, through the execution of the former by producer objects, and of the latter by actor objects. By reading procedures of producer objects, we can understand collaboration among objects easily.