Integrating Mobile, Web and Sensory Technologies to Support Inquiry-Based Science Learning

The objective of this study was to explore new and mobile collaboration technologies and to try to find more effective ways for museum visits with mobile technologies. The study was implemented in December 2002 with 20 Finnish high school students. The students were participating in alternative art course. All of the students seemed to learn quite easily the technologies and methods used in this study but still there was a lack of time in every lesson. This leads us to few important conclusions: When the new technology is used with new students and in new environments, it is necessary the reserve enough time for students to get familiar with new technology and new teaching arrangements.

MALL Revisited: Current Trends and Pedagogical Implications

Modeling approaches based on standards are of paramount importance in the field of front-end design for web and mobile applications. Problems are often encountered during the selection of tools for designing applications for developers and researchers, particularly applications that are related to time and cost in the market and academia. The Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) is a recently standardized modeling language designed for managing the content expression, user interaction and behavior control of front-end applications. IFML brings several benefits to the development process of web and mobile front-end applications. Thus, several tools have been developed for the exploitation of technical artifacts offered by current specifications. In this study, we discuss the tools proposed for modeling IFML to provide a comparative analysis while considering various criteria. The result can be used as a basis of tool selection for specific aspects.

Ubiquity in information systems is a new and important requirement commonly expressed by users due to the latest challenges in the mobile technologies. The design of information system dealing with high technological risks requires an appropriate and beneficial development process which is lacking today. The objective of this work is to solve this problem by proposing a new process for identifying and designing ubiquitous specifications that are integrated into an existent information system engineering process. In this paper we try to reconcile the different facets of the development of a ubiquitous systems to define a method oriented object that possesses an original vision of these systems. We intend in the future works to use this method in the design and development of mobile application that ensures the safety after earthquake.

Mobile technology has been increasingly applied to educational settings in the past decade. Although researchers have attempted to investigate both students’ and teachers’ preferences regarding mobile learning, few studies have investigated the differences between the two, an understanding of which is important for developing effective mobile learning environments. To address this issue, a mobile learning environmental preference survey (MLEPS) consisting of eight factors, “ease of use,” “continuity,” “relevance,” “adaptive content,” “multiple sources,” “timely guidance,” “student negotiation” and “inquiry learning,” was developed in this study. A total of 1239 students (609 males and 630 females) and 429 teachers (208 males and 221 females) who employed mobile technology to learn and teach in schools completed the questionnaire. From the structural equation models, it was found that the major difference between the preferences of teachers and students in learning with mobile technologies was that the teachers tended to focus more on the technical issues, while the students cared more about the richness and usefulness of the learning content. In addition, both the students and teachers considered that the “anytime” and “anywhere” support provided via the mobile technology played an important role during the learning activities, engaging them in searching for information, collecting data, interpreting data and summarizing findings. It is therefore suggested that learning environments which conform to both students’ and teachers’ preferences be developed in the future.

The Saudi Arabian government is committed to updating and improving its education system. Thus, in March 2017, a project was declared to convert the existing book-based methodology to modern, mobile technology in the K-12 education space by 2021. As part of this process, a deep-dive literature review of student acceptance of mobile learning confirmed that there was limited research into what elements had an effect on how much students were likely to accept learning with mobile applications in the five to 18-year-old demographic of K-12. The conclusion of the literature review was that the Saudi Arabian Education Ministry must acquire an understanding of these elements in order to strategize the implementation of the new technology. This study approached high school students, aged 16 – 18, in Saudi Arabia, to examine the elements which would influence their acceptance of mobile learning technology. The research consolidated known elements of education, namely learning self-management, system quality, and hedonic motivation with the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to create a significant theoretical model for the new technology in a high school setting. Conclusions were drawn that societal influence did not affect the student’s approach to mobile learning, but that learning self-management, the expectancy of effort and performance, hedonic motivation and the quality of the system did affect the acceptance behaviour of the students. It was also noted that gender was not a significant factor in the study

BackgroundEarly detection of febrile illnesses at community level is essential for improved malaria case management and control. Currently, mobile phone-based technology has been commonly used to collect and transfer health information and services in different settings. This study assessed the applicability of mobile phone-based technology in real-time reporting of fever cases and management of malaria by village health workers (VHWs) in north-eastern Tanzania.MethodsThe community mobile phone-based disease surveillance and treatment for malaria (ComDSTM) platform, combined with mobile phones and web applications, was developed and implemented in three villages and one dispensary in Muheza district from November 2013 to October 2014. A baseline census was conducted in May 2013. The data were uploaded on a web-based database and updated during follow-up home visits by VHWs. Active and passive case detection (ACD, PCD) of febrile cases were done by VHWs and cases found positive by malaria rapid diagnostic test (RDT) were given the first dose of artemether–lumefantrine (AL) at the dispensary. Each patient was visited at home by VHWs daily for the first 3 days to supervise intake of anti-malarial and on day 7 to monitor the recovery process. The data were captured and transmitted to the database using mobile phones.ResultsThe baseline population in the three villages was 2934 in 678 households. A total of 1907 febrile cases were recorded by VHWs and 1828 (95.9%) were captured using mobile phones. At the dispensary, 1778 (93.2%) febrile cases were registered and of these, 84.2% were captured through PCD. Positivity rates were 48.2 and 45.8% by RDT and microscopy, respectively. Nine cases had treatment failure reported on day 7 post-treatment and adherence to treatment was 98%. One patient with severe febrile illness was referred to Muheza district hospital.ConclusionThe study showed that mobile phone-based technology can be successfully used by VHWs in surveillance and timely reporting of fever episodes and monitoring of treatment failure in remote areas. Further optimization and scaling-up will be required to utilize the tools for improved malaria case management and drug resistance surveillance.

Handling the distribution of broilers has special attention. The distribution of poultry should be done in the shortest possible time to decrease broiler mortality rate. Real-time monitoring of poultry distribution is expected to control the stress level of poultry due to the length of travel time by limiting the delivery time window. In order to control the distribution time and distance, it is necessary to integrate vehicle routing and mobile technology. By adopting the digital twin-enabled framework model and combining it with Google APIs, web and mobile applications are generated to accommodate the real-time traveling time, vehicle capacity, and pickup-delivery activity. There is a significant change in travel distance in one delivery cycle after implementing the developed technology. The total travel distance was 493 KM decreased to 436 KM, which means a decrease of 11.5% from the initial total travel distance. In addition, there was a change in the total penalty time (delay) from 102 minutes to 85 minutes, decreasing delay time by 16.6%. This mobile technology's development can indirectly increase vehicle utilization by not overloading the vehicle capacity and reducing vehicle travel distance.

Consumer-centered software applications nowadays are required to be available both as mobile and desktop versions. However, the app design is frequently made only for one of the two (i.e., mobile first or web first) while missing an appropriate design for the other (which, in turn, simply mimics the interaction of the first one). This results into poor quality of the interaction on one or the other platform. Current solutions would require different designs, to be realized through different design methods and tools, and that may require to double development and maintenance costs. In order to mitigate such an issue, this paper proposes a novel approach that supports the design of both web and mobile applications at once. Starting from a unique requirement and business specification, where web- and mobile-specific aspects are captured through tagging, we derive a platformindependent design of the system specified in IFML. This model is subsequently refined and detailed for the two platforms, and used to automatically generate both the web and mobile versions. If more precise interactions are needed for the mobile part, a blending with MobML, a mobile-specific modeling language, is devised. Full traceability of the relations between artifacts is granted.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design framework that permits the developer to build complex applications from smaller modules called services. When applying SOA to web applications, developers face several challenges. Among others, the heterogeneous user interfaces provided by these services must be adapted to fit into the larger application.This paper discusses approaches to automated adaptation of web application's layout and design. We review the range of web-based user interface modifications, suggest a technique that allows us the automated execution of the described steps and finally explore transparent integration of the modified user interfaces into a given web page flow (using a proxy server). Our approach relies on the proposed meta-language UDLD, which permits application providers to equip their user interfaces with semantic information about included components.

This study examined the design and usability preferences in mobile applications among adolescent students at the González Suárez Educational Unit in the city of Ambato. The research focused on identifying the features most valued by students in the context of mobile applications. A survey was conducted with 242 upper elementary and high school students, evaluating ten design and usability features using a 5-point Likert scale. The results revealed a strong preference for intuitive interfaces, fast loading times, and ease of navigation. Personalization of appearance and compatibility with different devices were also highly valued. Offline functionality was considered important, reflecting local connectivity realities. Opinions on integration with social networks and the inclusion of tutorials were more divided. The study concluded that the design of educational mobile applications for Ecuadorian adolescents should prioritize efficiency, customization, and adaptability to different conditions of use. These findings provide a solid foundation for the development of more effective and engaging applications for adolescent students in the Ecuadorian context

Significant effort is currently invested in application integration, enabling business processes of different companies to interact and form complex multiparty processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification.In this article, we argue that Web services should be considered first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have long been advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this end, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web applications which use them, and (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services.Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.

Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications

The problem of the rapid creation of effective web applications of one class using formal means is considered. A conceptual approach to its solution is offered based on an analysis of the peculiarities of the construction of web applications. Our approach is based on defining the standard web application architecture and selecting its components using formal methods in accordance with user requirements. A formal logical system is proposed that uses the design of web applications as a process of outputting a formula specified according to the needs of the user, which defines the schemes of execution of the modules of the system. An important feature of this approach is the ability to visualise the process of designing the system in 3D, which creates the conditions for effective interaction between developers and machine development tools.

The objectives of this research are, first, to find mobile technology–informed ways of designing inquiry-based fieldwork, in support of students’ inquiry processes and, second, to evaluate how a technology-integrated fieldwork project can affect students’ knowledge and experience. In order to achieve these objectives, the study adopted a set of core design principles and guidelines for the creation of inquiry-based fieldwork projects, detailing tips and an example (i.e., the Yangdong Village Project) of these principles and guidelines’ application. In addition, this study used a questionnaire to determine the influence of the project on students’ understanding of the investigation area and their inquiry-related behaviors. It also analyzed conversation between students, to examine how students’ learning processes are supported in fieldwork through use of mobile technology. A total of 86 high school students (ages 17–18), from four schools located in the Seoul metropolitan area, participated in the project. The results of the analyses showed that participation in the project helped students become better informed about the area they investigated. While they were conducting the field tasks, they showed more inquiry-driven behaviors, such as being more active and adventurous, more talkative, and more responsible (88.7%). Technological support for the process of field inquiry was prominent in three situations: location identification, data capture, and monitoring. The functionalities of mobile technology that students used during the field inquiry would reflect not only the characteristics of the task, but also the types of mobile technology involved in the project.