Using a web service, mobile device and low-cost robot to teach computer science and engineering

Coding is increasingly popular in schools around the world and is often taught by non-specialist teachers as an integrated task with other subject areas. In this article, we explore the relationship between computer science (CS) concepts and students’ multimodal expression in a coding animated narrative (CAN) task in the context of an integrated English-Technology unit of learning. Through this collective case study, we explore how CS concepts underpin semiotic elements of an animated narrative, analyse the factors that influence the extent to which students exercise those concepts, and reveal the tensions and opportunities that a CAN task may present for learning computer science concepts in regular, non-specialist, cross-curricular classrooms. The findings suggest that CAN tasks are unique in presenting opportunities for students to learn challenging CS concepts such as synchronisation and parallelism. At the same time, CAN tasks present tensions for teaching CS concepts in non-specialist classrooms, where student projects are often judged on their visual qualities. In such settings, procedural, rather than conceptual knowledge, may be a more efficient route to creative outcomes. It also means that drawing skills need to be prioritised. Role specialisation often led to better quality projects but at the expense of individual students’ conceptual development in computer science.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Attracting and Retaining Women in Computer Science and Engineering: Evaluating the Results Abstract Computer science and engineering communities have been exploring a variety of activities and techniques to attract and retain more students, especially women and minorities, to computer science and computer engineering degree programs1. This paper briefly describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting young women into undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT). It also describes a series of activities aimed at improving the retention rate of students already in our programs, particularly during the freshman year. Such recruitment and retention efforts are critical to the country’s efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and are a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT. We initially designed a three-part plan to achieve our recruitment and retention goals: • Sponsorship of portable and mobile summer computer engineering robotics camps for middle and high-school women students, coordinating with the regional Girl Scouts councils and other organizations to help with the recruitment; • Creation of an Ambassador program using young women currently enrolled in the upper division of current computer science and computer engineering programs as a form of outreach to area high schools and junior colleges; and • Expansion of our successful undergraduate mentoring program by using the Ambassador cohort mentioned above as mentors for incoming freshman and first-year transfer women entering our programs. This paper will focus primarily on the summer camp program and present an analysis of the results we have seen to date after 2 years of camp activities. Results from student surveys and parent surveys will be presented. The paper concludes with recommended changes and improvements in the program, as well as a discussion of adaptations that would create programs suitable for implementation at other institutions as well as programs aimed at a different target population. The three phases previously enumerated each build upon currently accepted educational practices. The robotics summer camp in particular used problem-based learning approaches, similar to those described in The Power of Problem-Based Learning2. This study clearly demonstrates the significant benefits of teaching students how to think by using a problem-based approach. We also developed a mobile laboratory so that the summer camp can be held at several locations, thus broadening and expanding the reach of the camps to traditionally underserved populations and geographical regions. Similarly, both the ambassador and mentoring programs derive from research showing how the recruitment and retention of women in engineering- related fields can be increased by providing opportunities to develop student-to-student relationships3, 4.

Synchronization is a very important concept in computer science and engineering. It is a required topic in courses of various levels concerning operating systems, system programming, uniprocessor/multiprocessor systems, distributed systems, computer networks, and databases. Nevertheless, due to the dynamic nature of the computing events involved, synchronization is difficult for instructors to teach and difficult for students to understand. The proposed work is intended to develop an interactive visualization software tool that can be used to (1) demonstrate the existence of synchronization problems and (2) illustrate the principles and workings of the synchronization techniques used to solve those problems. The tool, implemented in Java, allows the user to dynamically configure a synchronization environment. The user can choose one of several synchronization techniques, such as binary semaphores, counting semaphores, or monitors, to remedy a problem. Similarly, the synchronization of the interacting processes is animated.

We present a courseware design and implementation for pre-engineering university summer school outreach program intended for 6th to 12th grade pupils (K-12). The course focuses on building hardware and software for three IoT devices of increasing complexity and in doing so introduces various important computer science and engineering concepts. Device design constraints allow for very low cost of the built prototypes (5 - 10 € per device). We used NodeMCU with ESP8266 as a hardware platform. Lua as a part of NodeMCU firmware was used as a programming language due to simple syntax, possible interactive use, and compact source code that consisted of about 150 lines of code on average for each device. Pupils were provided with source code templates and encouraged to supplement the code with missing parts. The approach was scaled to primary and secondary schools’ curricula by organizing and evaluating a continuing education course for teachers in pre-university education.

The rapid rate of the development of computer technology raises the issue of how to reform Computer Science education in elementary and middle schools. In Korea the government has taken this issue seriously, and the Ministry of Education & Human Resources Development has announced substantial revisions to its computing curricula, leading to a new curriculum in Informatics to be introduced for middle schools in 2010, and for high schools in 2011. There is a proposal that the elementary school curriculum will be linked to these, and with a stronger focus on not just learning how to operate computers and software, but understanding the methods and algorithms behind Computer Science. Research on identifying effective teaching methods for CS topics at the elementary level is critical at the moment, as the content of the developing curriculum will be influenced by information about which topics are able to be taught effectively at this level. We are particularly interested to establish how these topics can be covered effectively without having to reduce them to a comfortable re-working of the status quo driven by a lack of background on teaching these new topics. Hence it is important to have experience with teaching such topics so that they can be considered for widespread use in the curriculum. As in most countries, Korean elementary school teachers are generalists, and therefore the Informatics curriculum needs to be presented in a way that a generalist can engage with it, as well as engage their students. One approach that avoids the difficulties and distraction of computers in the elementary school classroom is the use of offline activities: activities that work with Computer Science concepts, but are not done at the computer. These aim to educate students about abstract and challenging concepts behind algorithms, but without using a computer. It is our belief that computer science fundamentals can be taught without the help of computers; many key concepts predate the modern computer, and many demonstrations are available for a wide range of concepts. Currently the existing work on offline activities is not directly aimed at teaching CS to elementary-age children. Much of the published work is aimed primarily at tertiary level students, and is generally intended for motivated students in a university classroom. Most of the kinesthetic material developed for elementary school material is aimed at enthusing students about CS; they explicitly do not presume to teach ideas , but simply inform students about the kind of thinking and problem solving that is required for CS, and therefore make students better informed about choosing a career in the field. In particular, assessment is an important component of teaching, and current resources are not strong in this area. With the opportunity for CS topics to be taught to students, we have experimented with using kinesthetic approaches in the classroom. In addition to needing to provide assessment, we have identified that a particular issue is that elementary level teachers are usually non-specialists, and we report on work to enable such teachers to adopt CS teaching material effectively. An important component of this is providing background information about how the topic is used in practice. The poster summarises our experiences and feedback from teachers in making this material accessible for elementary school students.

This study focuses on gender issues in terms of participation, achievement and duration of studies at the Tertiary level of education in Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E). For this reason, 1957 degrees earned by Computer Engineers were studied. These diplomas cover a 21 year period of graduation at the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID), University of Patras, Greece. The analysis of the data shows that: a) male graduate students outnumbered the female ones by three to one, b) in terms of achievement, no significant differences exist between male and female graduate computer engineers, and c) female students complete their studies earlier than their male counterparts.

Considering that some intelligent software in mobile devices is related to location of sensors and devices, regression testing for it faces a major challenge. Test case prioritization (TCP), as a kind of regression test optimization technique, is beneficial to improve test efficiency. However, traditional TCP techniques may have limitations on testing intelligent software embedded in mobile devices because they do not take into account characteristics of mobile devices. This paper uses a smart mall as a scenario to design a novel location-based TCP technique for software embedded in mobile devices using the law of gravitation. First, test gravitation is proposed by applying the idea of universal gravitation. Second, a specific calculation model of test gravitation is designed for a smart mall scenario. Third, how to create a faulted test case set is designed by the pseudocode. Fourth, a location-based TCP using the law of gravitation algorithm is proposed, which utilizes test case information, fault information, and location information to prioritize test cases. Finally, an empirical evaluation is presented by using one industrial project. The observation, underlying the experimental results, is that our proposed TCP approach performs better than traditional TCP techniques. In addition, besides location information, the level of devices is also an important factor which affects the prioritization efficiency.

Web Services are today a well-accepted technology. Especially in the area of Cloud Computing, Web Services usually provide one of the building blocks of the used technology. Another driving technology nowadays are mobile devices. Nevertheless, there is not much research conducted yet in bringing these two important technologies together, e.g. with respect to providing Web Services on mobile devices. While there is already some technology that allows to deploy Web Services directly on mobile devices, it seems that there is still a lack of research about use-cases and/or scenarios that benefit from mobile Web Services. Therefore, this paper presents an approach that allows the evaluation of both, the technology for providing Web Service on mobile devices and mobile Web Services themselves.

In today`s world of science & technology mobile device especially Smartphones plays the role of “"Jinn" who fulfill demand of the user. Smartphone through its Internet facility allows users to access various internet based web services ubiquitously to fulfill his/her demand. Web Services can be of two types SOAP or Restful services. Many researchers have mentioned that SOAP based services are heavy to consume on mobile device despite the fact that most of the companies still uses SOAP services but answer to this challenge is Restful Web Services. Restful services also surfers from many problems like processing of work or accessing services on device due to mobile phone`s small screen size, low processing power, less memory storage capacity etc. That`s why the heavy processing work is shifted on Cloud and only client part will be on mobile device, this integration is called as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). In MCC important point need to consider is to improve the performance of web services in terms of speed, memory usage and reducing latency. To resolve these issues, this paper has proposed MCC architecture. We have divided this paper is into two parts, in the first part; we did comparative analysis of Web Service consumption on mobile devices using cloud and various parameters used. In second part we have proposed architecture for mobile Web Services in Cloud which compress response data using Gzip and use of web caching to reduce overhead of repeated or previously accessed Web Service.

Volume visualization has become an essential tool for geoscientists in the oil and gas industry. Using this technology, geosci¬entists interact with volumes of seismic data to locate, isolate, and understand the spatial relationships of important geologic features in a context-rich 3D environment. In the past decade, the continued evolution in hardware and software of mobile devices is putting desktop capabilities in everyone’s palms. As such, mobile devices are becoming more useful as an interactive 3D visualization platform. In this paper, I evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of mobile devices to perform seismic vol¬ume visualization. Sub-volumes of data containing different stratigraphic depositional environments were first extracted from three 3D seismic surveys. The rendered 3D graphics were examined in detail. The results illustrate that volume visualization on mobile devices enables the exploration of detailed variations in the seismic response. Therefore, it facilitates the interpretation of the imaged geologic features. I anticipate that mobile devices will revolutionize the interpretation of seismic data volumes by allowing geoscientists to visually examine their data anywhere and at any time.

Guest Editorial

Nowadays, with the advancement in mobile technologies, the use of web services has seen an explosion in interest for mobile computing environment. However, the heavyweight nature of conventional web services to be deployed on mobile devices brings new challenges in mobile computing in the coming future. Web services technology and mobile computing domains are converging at their intersection which leads to Mobile Web Services (MWS) which enables the service access in users’ mobile device. As the numbers of web services are increasing dramatically, the web service discovery becomes more important to discover the usable web services in effective and efficient manner. This paper discusses an overview of mobile challenges in MWS recent research, and a summary of the issues. Moreover, current approaches of Mobile Web Services Discovery are classified and these approaches are compared to some criteria. The results of this study will help researchers to deliver more applicable solutions with the most appropriate approaches for Mobile Web Services Discovery.KeywordsWeb ServicesMobile Web Serviceweb service discoverymobile computingmobile web service discovery

Mobile device has become an essential element in our day-to-day lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, web service has become extremely important to access internet services through mobile. However, security has become a major concern in the field of Mobile Web services technology and the complexity also arises in the distribution and the integration of the web services. Now-a-days the use of mobile applications customers increases notable. Researchers put on efforts to bring out the state-of-the art in mobile web services with security for accessing web services through mobile devices. However, there is no attempt made so far to secure web services at multi-level. Now-a-days mobile web services with security only are not enough, at the same time mobile web services must be an intelligent. In this paper, we have proposed a novel architecture namely Intelligent, Integrated Secure Mobile Web Services (IISMWS) to access web services through mobile devices in a secured manner.

As cloud computing emerges as the next novel concept in computer science, it becomes clear that the model applied in large data storage systems used to resolve issues coming forth from an increasing demand, could also be used to resolve the very high bandwidth requirements on access networks, core network equipment and long communication paths between users and servers in the today's cellular networks. Also, today's with the development of wireless access technologies (3/4 G, LTE and WiMAX), the standard for wireless communication of high speed data for mobile phones and data terminals, are set to power the cloud computing world as well and will see the emergence of a combine that will power business operations. This Paper gives a survey of applying the cloud computing model in mobile devices MCC, and LTE-based cellular systems architecture which helps have an overview of cloud computing, MCC and LTE architecture including the definition, architecture, and applications. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of MCC are discussed.

A Web-Based Perioperative Dashboard as a Platform for Anesthesia Informatics Innovation.