Performing a course material enhancement process with asynchronous interactive online system

Online systems have come to be heavily used in education, particularly for online learning and collecting information not otherwise readily available. Most e-learning systems, including interactive learning systems, have been designed to “push” course materials to students but rarely to “collect” or “pull” ideas from them. The interactive mechanisms in proposed instructional design models, however, prevent many potential designers from improving course quality, even though some believe that the learning experience and the comments of students are important for enhancing course materials. As well, students could actually contribute to instructional design.This paper presents a course material enhancement process that elicits ideas from students by encouraging students to modify course materials. This process had been tested on different higher education programs, both graduate and undergraduate. It aims to understand which programs’ students have a higher willingness to participate in this work and if they can benefit from this process. To facilitate this research, an asynchronous interaction system, teacher digital assistant (TDA), was designed for teachers to receive responses, recommendations, and modified materials from students at any time. The major advantage of this process is that it could embed students’ thoughts into the course material to improve the curriculum, which can benefit future students.     

“Graphical” Jogthrough: expert based methodology for user interface evaluation, applied in the case of an educational simulation interface

“Walkthrough” and “Jogthrough” techniques are well known expert based methodologies for the evaluation of user interface design. In this paper we describe the use of “Graphical” Jogthrough method for evaluating the interface design of the Network Simulator, an educational simulation program that enables users to virtually build a computer network, install hardware and software components, make the necessary settings and test the functionality of the network. Graphical Jogthrough is a further modification of a typical Jogthrough method, where evaluators' ratings produce evidence in the form of a graph, presenting estimated proportion of users who effectively use the interface versus the time they had to work with it in order to succeed effectiveness. We comment on the question: “What are the possible benefits and limitations of the Graphical Jogthrough method when applied in the case of educational software interface design?” We present the results of the evaluation session, and concluding from our experience we argue that the method could offer designers quantitative and qualitative data for formulating a useful (though rough in some aspects) estimation about the novice–becoming–expert pace that end users might follow when working with the evaluated interface.     

A Visual and Formal Glue between Application and Interaction

The construction of interactive software is known to be a difficult task. As far as the non-interactive part of the application is concerned, designers can find support in the field of software engineering, using object-oriented design methods for example. With regard to the user interface per se, a number of interactive tools (interface builders) are available, that allows creating interactively the look and feel of the interface. However, relating an object-oriented design with a proper user-interface design is still a matter of craft and experience, and few techniques permit the seamless integration of the two.The work presented here aims at bridging this gap. The paper proposes a visual language, based on Petri nets, for the design of the dialogue of interactive systems. This language allows specifying both activation and rendering on the one hand, and provides a seamless integration with an object-oriented design on the other.     

Move to get moved: a search for methods,tools and knowledge to design for expressive and rich movement-based interaction

The world is inherently meaningful for us, i.e. we perceive the world in terms of what we can do with it, and by physically interacting with it we access this meaning and express the meaning. We believe that this is the core reason and foundation for turning to movement-based interaction. ‘Interaction creates meaning’ does not only hold for users during interaction but also for designers when generating ideas and developing concepts. Therefore, we postulate that if one truly likes to design for movement-based interaction, one has to be or become an expert in movement, not just theoretically, by imagination or on paper, but by doing and experiencing while designing. In order to do so, we believe that designers need design tools, techniques, knowledge, awareness and skills that support their search for expressive, rich behaviour. Our search for this support resulted in several methods, tools and knowledge that help designers exploring, visualising and reflecting on interactions. Our developed methods and tools such as the Design Movement approach with its choreography of interaction, gestural design tools, interactive installations and interactive tangible sketching, have not only supported and inspired designers to design for movement-based interaction, but also resulted in surprising, fresh designs in comparison with the limited scope of rather uniform and traditional electronic consumer products. This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of our approach.     

Who benefits from virtuality?

For educational software to take advantage of contemporary views of learning, instructional designers need to employ design models that incorporate the variety of ideas that are based on constructivist frameworks for developing learning environments. These environments, if well designed, can support learner construction of knowledge, however, such frameworks are based upon arguments that learners should be placed in authentic environments that incorporate sophisticated representations of context through such constructs as “virtual worlds”. Within these environments the learner is supported by visual metaphors constructed to represent the information structure and how the “world” operates. This paper will discuss the framework employed in the development of several virtual solutions and the process by which they were constructed.     

A semiotic engineering approach to user interface design

Designing software involves good perception, good reasoning, and a talent to express oneself effectively through programming and interactive languages. Semiotic theories can help HCI designers increase their power to perceive, reason and communicate. By presenting some of the results we have reached with semiotic engineering over the last few years, we suggest that the main contributions of semiotic theory in supporting HCI design are: to provide designers with new perceptions on the process and product of HCI design; to bind together all the stages of software development and use, giving them a unique homogeneous treatment; and to pose innovative questions that extend the frontiers of HCI investigations.     

Semiotic engineering: bringing designers and users together at interaction time

Semiotic engineering is a semiotic theory of human–computer interaction, where interactive computer systems are viewed as one-shot messages sent from designers to users. Through the system's interface, in many direct and indirect ways, designers are telling the users how they can, should, or must interact with the system in order to achieve a particular range of goals anticipated at design time. Designers are thus active interlocutors at human–computer interaction time. Their interactive discourse is delivered implicitly and/or explicitly by the system, which constitutes the designer's deputy. The importance of bringing designers and users together at interaction time springs from the intellectual nature of software artifacts. They are the result of human reasoning, choice and decision, rather than the direct effect of universal or natural laws. An adequate understanding of interactive artifacts depends on apprehending and comprehending the human intellect in action. Hence, in addition to producing interactive artifacts, designers must also introduce them appropriately, as is the case of other intellectual products. In this paper, we show how semiotic engineering can provide substantial theoretic support for viewing and exploring design possibilities brought about by this shift in perspective. We also discuss ontological and epistemological aspects of the theory, and conclude that it can bridge some of the gaps between other fragmented HCI theories and approaches.     

Information systems theory

The overview presented covers a wide spectrum of aspects on information systems. Consequently, we had to be very brief and for detailed definitions and discussions we must refer the interested reader to the underlying literature. We have described how information systems present complex problems to their designers and we argued that it is hardly possible for any one individual to acquire (and continuously update) sufficient skill over the whole spectrum of problems. It is shown how the partitioning of the design task into two major areas, the infological or behavioral area on the one hand and the datalogical and computer technology oriented area on the other hand, makes it possible to combine the skills of two (or more) groups of people. In addition, the users are to be directly involved in the (infological part of) design. Development in the “infological area”, as surveyed in the paper, has brought us to the situation where it is possible to apply a documentation technique that is computer independent and intelligible to the lay users in its infological parts and yet is precise enough to the data and program design stage. Actual research problems in the infological area are associated with how one could develop the understanding and the motivation of the users so that they can better exploit the possibility to control the design process that is now offered to them. Such research is not covered by the paper. Development in the “datalogical area”, as presented has increased the possibilities for using computers as aid to the designers and to base the design on more system-wide information. A research field which is presently of high interest, but not presented in the paper, is the development of more formalized methods for handling the interface between the infological and the datalogical design stages. Such research is presently making promising progress in combining recent results from “structured programming” and ”structured information analysis”.     

Measuring consumer perceptions for a better comprehension, specification and assessment of product semantics

Product semantics, the “study of the symbolic qualities of man-made forms in the context of their use, and application of this knowledge to industrial design” is an important challenge in product design. Because of subjectivity, this particular dimension of the user's need is difficult to express, to quantify and to assess. This paper presents a general approach to assess product semantics in a sound way. It is based on usability tests, and involves several classical methods in marketing and decision-making theory, as multidimensional scaling, semantic differential method, factor analysis, pairwise comparison and analytical hierarchy process. As a result, our integrated approach provides designers with a tool which helps understand and specify the semantic part of the need; it rates and ranks the new product prototypes according to their closeness to the specified “ideal product”, and it underlines the particular semantic dimensions that should be improved. To illustrate our approach, we have performed usability tests and applied our methodology to the design of table glasses. For the sake of clarity, each stage of the methodology is presented in detail on this particular example.

Relevance to industry

The integrated framework proposed in this paper can be readily deployed in companies and used at different stages of the design of products. Firstly, our methodology provides a frame for describing how a given products family is perceived by users, and for storing and up-dating these data. Secondly, the data can be used to specify target requirements for a new product by qualitative comparisons to existing products. Finally, emerging product concepts may be directly assessed with regards to the requirements in a simple qualitative and comparative way.     

Computational support for collective creativity

The goal of our research is to develop computer systems that support designers’ collective creativity; such systems support individual creative aspects in design through the use of representations created by others in the community. We have developed two systems, IAM-eMMa and EVIDII, that both aim at supporting designers in finding visual images that would be useful for their creative design task. IAM-eMMa uses knowledge-based rules, which are constructed by other designers, to retrieve images related to a design task, and infers the underlying “rationale” when a designer chooses one of the images. EVIDII allows designers to associate affective words and images, and then shows several visual representations of the relationships among designers, images and words. By observing designers interacting with the two systems, we have identified that systems for supporting collective creativity need to be based on design knowledge that: (1) is contextualized; (2) is respectable and trustful; and (3) enables “appropriation” of a design task.     

Reconfigurable control of robotized manufacturing cells

This paper investigates the field of manufacturing system control. The addressed subject is indeed very fascinating, due to the importance that it has reached in the last decades both at research and industrial level. On the other hand, it seems to the author that most of the complexity intrinsic to the subject itself relies on the different meanings or levels of abstraction that both the terms “manufacturing system” and “control” may symbolize. The presented research aims to face the topic in a concrete fashion, i.e., by developing a control software system for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell. Two different development methodologies, from the conceptual design to the actual implementation, of a cell control system are presented and compared. The former, based on ladder logic diagrams, for a PLC controlled manufacturing cell; the latter, based on object-oriented modeling and programming techniques, for a PC controlled manufacturing cell. The analysis has been conducted considering the internal and external requirements of the manufacturing system, mostly driven by the contemporary industrial need of reconfigurable control systems, largely acknowledged as the critical key to succeed in the new era of mass customization.     

Interaction with a desktop virtual environment: a 2D view into a 3D world

With the development of computer software and hardware in the past few years, it has been possible to produce effective training virtual environments on everyday personal computers with little expert training required for users or designers. However, the development of the equipment that enables this has brought little coinciding research on what features to include when designing these environments. Despite these increased advances in PC capabilities for desktop virtual environments (VEs), there are still limitations on the number of objects that can be programmed to be interactive, usually due to restrictions on programming time and cost. As a result, it is often left to the programmer to decide which of the objects included to increase the realism of the environment will be interactive and which aesthetic. The work presented in this paper is an experiment that aims to establish a guide for environment designers to aid effective environment interaction development by identifying key elements in a VE design.

Extraction of geometric characteristics for manufacturability assessment

One of the advantages of feature-based design is that it provides data which are defined as parameters of features in readily available forms for tasks from design through manufacturing. It can thus facilitate the integration of CAD and CAM. However, not all design features are features required in down stream applications and not all parameters or data can be predefined in the features. One of the significant examples is property that is formed by feature interactions. For example, the interaction of a positive feature and a negative feature induces a wall thickness change that might cause defects in a part. Therefore, the identification of the wall thickness change by detecting the feature interaction is required in the moldability assessment.The work presented in this paper deals with the extraction of geometric characteristics in feature-based design for manufacturability assessment. We focus on the manufacturability assessment of discrete parts with emphasis on a net shape process—injection molding. The definition, derivation and representation of the spatial relationships between features are described. The geometric characteristics formed by feature interactions are generalized as significant items, such as “depth”, “thickness”, “height” etc. based on the generalization of feature shapes. Reasoning on feature interactions and extraction of geometric characteristics is treated as a refinement procedure. High-level spatial relationships—“is_in”, “adjacent_to” and “coplanar” as well as their geometric details are first derived. The significant items formed from feature interactions are then computed based on the detailed spatial relationships. This work was implemented in a computer-aided concurrent product and process development environment to support molding product design assessment.     

基于反馈的交互式动态GIS景观评价模型

提出一种基于反馈的交互式动态GIS景观评价模型,并指出该模型与4D-GIS模型相比较的优点.该评价模型充分考虑景观的动态性,在规划中同时加入了景观规划设计师的交互行为和规划系统本身的交互功能.利用系统本身的交互能力提供的反馈功能,规划人员可以对景观评价系统进行实时控制和修正,以达到更好的景观规划效果.最后通过一个实例简要说明了应用基于该模型的景观评价系统进行规划设计的通用流程.     

Why don't telephones have off switches? Understanding the use of everyday technologies: A research note

Unlike other technologies, the telephone is unusual in that it cannot be ‘turned off’. Almost uniquely, its design does not incorporate an off switch, or when it does, it tends to be located in an inaccessible position (such as on the underside of the phone). Rather than arguing that this is a special feature of telephones, this paper argues that this is an example of designers seeing rules as generators of action, rather than resources for action. That is, a rule of phone behaviour is “when a phone rings, answer it”. However, rules do not simply generate action. We can choose when not to follow it. Support for this case has been neglected by designers, forcing individuals to appropriate other technologies to support not answering the phone. These rules of use are implicit in how we conceptualise the use of technology, and in turn, how we perform design. We suggest that designers can be aided by understanding better the nature of rule following, allowing them to design technology that supports ‘deviant’, yet equally valid modes of use.     

On the Evolution Complexity of Design Patterns

Software co-evolution can be characterised as a way to “adjust” any given software implementation to a change (“shift”) in the software requirements. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of evolution complexity to precisely quantify the cost of adjusting a particular implementation to a change (“shift”) in the requirements. As a validation, we show that this definition formalises intuition about the evolvability of design patterns.     

Knowledge representation of the software architecture design process based on situation calculus

Software architecture design is an interactive, complex, decision‐making process. Such a design process involves the exploration, evaluation, and composition of design alternatives. Increasingly, new computer‐aided tools are available to help designers in these complex activities. However, these tools do not know how design is actually done, in other words, by means of which design activities the final artefact was obtained. In fact, the architectural design knowledge exclusively rests in the mind of designers, and there is an urgent need to move it, as much as possible, to a computer‐supported environment that enables the capture of this type of knowledge. This contribution addresses this need by introducing a model for capturing how products under development are generated and transformed along the software architecture design process. The proposed model follows an operational perspective, where architectural design decisions are modelled by means of sequences of operations that are applied on the design products. Situation calculus is used to formally express the existence of an object in a given state of a design process. In addition, this formalism allows us expressing without ambiguities when an operation can be performed in a specific state of the design process.     

Worksheets and Notebooks: Can We Teach Mathematical Algorithms with Them?

This paper describes how computer algebra systems can be used to help students understand mathematical algorithms. Since one can write programs in these systems, one way to help the students is to show them complete programs and try to show them what the programs do. However, programs are like black boxes; you see what goes in and what comes out. To understand the program you need to show the steps that it makes because most students need to see a worked example in detail in order to see what an algorithm is doing before they understand how it works. Another problem with programs is that programs force you to be explicit about details; you must formulate the termination conditions, estimate degree bounds, specify domains of variables, etc. These details often get in the way of illustrating the basic algorithm.The premise of this article is that interactive worksheets and notebooks, which are now available in several computer algebra systems, sometimes provide a better alternative than programs as a teaching aid. In a worksheet or notebook, we can present an algorithm by following the sequence steps done. If part of the algorithm is difficult to express as a single command, or difficult to program, the results can be “typed in” instead. Other parts which may be difficult to formalize in a program, may be very obvious from looking at the output. To illustrate this, we have presented five algorithms as worksheets which we have used for teaching undergraduate mathematics and computer science classes.     

Systematic integration of design methods

As software becomes more complex, designers are attempting to integrate design methods so they can start with a clear and accurate specification. Although designers typically commit to one method, they often find that its notation is not rich enough to express semantic concepts such as data persistence or that it lacks the guidance needed to choose design entities, such as objects or classes. Consequently, they attempt to borrow useful ideas and notations from other methods. Design method integration has many benefits, but designers lack a framework to make such efforts more systematic and cost effective. The author describes a possible framework and uses it to guide the integration of the Booch and OMT design methods     

Context, situations, and design agents

The terms “context” and “situation” are often used interchangeably or to denote a variety of concepts. This paper aims to show that these are two different but related concepts and it reifies their difference within the framework of design agents. The external world of an agent is described as the aggregation of all entities that the agent could possibly sense or effect, where context is from its external world that an agent interacts with and is aware of. The interpreted world of an agent is described in terms of the experiences of that agent, where situations are processes that direct how interactive experiences proceed. Situations determine what part of the external world are in the current context, and situations influence interaction and so influence what and how common ground is acquired.