Engaging students in authoring and playing computer games

Computer games have become a commonplace but engaging activity among students. They enjoy playing computer games as they can perform larger-than-life activities virtually such as jumping from great heights, flying planes, and racing cars; actions that are otherwise not possible in real life. Computer games also offer user interactivity which gives them a certain appeal. Considering this appeal, educators should consider integrating computer games into student learning and to encourage students to author computer games of their own. It is thought that students can be engaged in learning by authoring and using computer games and can also gain essential skills such as collaboration, teamwork, problem solving and deductive reasoning. The research in this study revolves around building student engagement through the task of authoring computer games. The study aims to demonstrate how the creation and sharing of student-authored educational games might facilitate student engagement and how ICT (information and communication technology) plays a supportive role in student learning. Results from this study may lead to the broader integration of computer games into student learning and contribute to similar studies. In this qualitative case study, based in a state school in a low socio-economic area west of Brisbane, Australia, students were selected in both junior and senior secondary classes who have authored computer games as a part of their ICT learning. Senior secondary students (Year 12 ICT) were given the task of programming the games, which were to be based on Mathematics learning topics while the junior secondary students (Year 8 ICT) were given the task of creating multimedia elements for the games. A Mathematics teacher volunteered to assist in the project and provided guidance on the inclusion of suitable Mathematics curricular content into these computer games. The student-authored computer games were then used to support another group of Year 8 Mathematics students to learn the topics of Area, Volume and Time. Data was collected through interviews, classroom observations and artefacts. The teacher researcher, acting in the role of ICT teacher, coordinated with the students and the Mathematics teacher to conduct this study. Instrumental case study was applied as research methodology and Third Generation Activity Theory served as theoretical framework for this study. Data was analysed adopting qualitative coding procedures. Findings of this study indicate that having students author and play computer games promoted student engagement and that ICT played a supportive role in learning and allowed students to gain certain essential skills. Although this study will suggest integrating computer games to support classroom learning, it cannot be presumed that computer games are an immediate solution for promoting student engagement.

Augmented Reality Process Modelling Tool

Video presented as part of BPM2011 demonstration(France). In this video we show a prototype BPMN process modelling tool which uses Augmented Reality techniques to increase the sense of immersion when editing a process model. The avatar represents a remotely logged in user, and facilitates greater insight into the editing actions of the collaborator than present 2D web-based approaches in collaborative process modelling. We modified the Second Life client to integrate the ARToolkit in order to support pattern-based AR.

Collaborative 3D BPMN Editor Two

Video presented as part of AMCIS 2010 conference in Lima Peru. New improved collaborative BPMN editor video, showing a new interface and collaboration capabilities via remote login of another avatar.

Collaborative BPMN process modelling

Situated on Youtube, and shown in various locations. A video showing members of the QUT BPM research group using a Mimio pen-based tabletop system for collaborative process modelling.

The SCOOT experience : games in place : collaborative interventions in socio-spatial practices

The principal focus of this thesis is the representation of a significant creative practice in relation to the design and installation of the Location-Based Game, SCOOT. This project demonstrates new understandings relating to the contingencies and potentials for transferring positive aspects of digital gameplay to everyday physical environments in an effort to reveal hidden histories and revitalise peoples’ interactions with their local urban spaces.

From solving puzzles to designing solutions : integrating design thinking into evidence based practice

Evidence based practice (EBP) focuses on solving ‘tame’ problems, where literature supports question construction toward determining a solution. What happens when there is no existing evidence, or when the need for agility precludes a full EBP implementation? How might we build a more agile and innovative practice that facilitates the design of solutions to complex and wicked problems, particularly in cases where there is no existing literature? As problem solving and innovation methods, EBP and design thinking overlap considerably. The literature indicates the potential benefits to be gained for evidence based practice from adopting a human-centred rather than literature-focused foundation. The design thinking process is social and collaborative by nature, which enables it to be more agile and produce more innovative results than evidence based practice. This paper recommends a hybrid approach to maximise the strengths and benefits of the two methods for designing solutions to wicked problems. Incorporating design thinking principles and tools into EBP has the potential to move its applicability beyond tame problems and continuous improvement, and toward wicked problem solving and innovation. The potential of this hybrid approach in practice is yet to be explored.

Urban transit quality of service : user perception and behaviour

Despite its potential multiple contributions to sustainable policy objectives, urban transit is generally not widely used by the public in terms of its market share compared to that of automobiles, particularly in affluent societies with low-density urban forms like Australia. Transit service providers need to attract more people to transit by improving transit quality of service. The key to cost-effective transit service improvements lies in accurate evaluation of policy proposals by taking into account their impacts on transit users. If transit providers knew what is more or less important to their customers, they could focus their efforts on optimising customer-oriented service. Policy interventions could also be specified to influence transit users’ travel decisions, with targets of customer satisfaction and broader community welfare. This significance motivates the research into the relationship between urban transit quality of service and its user perception as well as behaviour. This research focused on two dimensions of transit user’s travel behaviour: route choice and access arrival time choice. The study area chosen was a busy urban transit corridor linking Brisbane central business district (CBD) and the St. Lucia campus of The University of Queensland (UQ). This multi-system corridor provided a ‘natural experiment’ for transit users between the CBD and UQ, as they can choose between busway 109 (with grade-separate exclusive right-of-way), ordinary on-street bus 412, and linear fast ferry CityCat on the Brisbane River. The population of interest was set as the attendees to UQ, who travelled from the CBD or from a suburb via the CBD. Two waves of internet-based self-completion questionnaire surveys were conducted to collect data on sampled passengers’ perception of transit service quality and behaviour of using public transit in the study area. The first wave survey is to collect behaviour and attitude data on respondents’ daily transit usage and their direct rating of importance on factors of route-level transit quality of service. A series of statistical analyses is conducted to examine the relationships between transit users’ travel and personal characteristics and their transit usage characteristics. A factor-cluster segmentation procedure is applied to respodents’ importance ratings on service quality variables regarding transit route preference to explore users’ various perspectives to transit quality of service. Based on the perceptions of service quality collected from the second wave survey, a series of quality criteria of the transit routes under study was quantitatively measured, particularly, the travel time reliability in terms of schedule adherence. It was proved that mixed traffic conditions and peak-period effects can affect transit service reliability. Multinomial logit models of transit user’s route choice were estimated using route-level service quality perceptions collected in the second wave survey. Relative importance of service quality factors were derived from choice model’s significant parameter estimates, such as access and egress times, seat availability, and busway system. Interpretations of the parameter estimates were conducted, particularly the equivalent in-vehicle time of access and egress times, and busway in-vehicle time. Market segmentation by trip origin was applied to investigate the difference in magnitude between the parameter estimates of access and egress times. The significant costs of transfer in transit trips were highlighted. These importance ratios were applied back to quality perceptions collected as RP data to compare the satisfaction levels between the service attributes and to generate an action relevance matrix to prioritise attributes for quality improvement. An empirical study on the relationship between average passenger waiting time and transit service characteristics was performed using the service quality perceived. Passenger arrivals for services with long headways (over 15 minutes) were found to be obviously coordinated with scheduled departure times of transit vehicles in order to reduce waiting time. This drove further investigations and modelling innovations in passenger’ access arrival time choice and its relationships with transit service characteristics and average passenger waiting time. Specifically, original contributions were made in formulation of expected waiting time, analysis of the risk-aversion attitude to missing desired service run in the passengers’ access time arrivals’ choice, and extensions of the utility function specification for modelling passenger access arrival distribution, by using complicated expected utility forms and non-linear probability weighting to explicitly accommodate the risk of missing an intended service and passenger’s risk-aversion attitude. Discussions on this research’s contributions to knowledge, its limitations, and recommendations for future research are provided at the concluding section of this thesis.

User expertise in contemporary information systems : conceptualization, measurement and application

The development of user expertise is a strategic imperative for organizations in hyper-competitive markets. This paper conceptualizes opreationalises and validates user expertise in contemporary Information Systems (IS) as a formative, multidimensional index. Such a validated and widely accepted index would facilitate progression of past research on user competence and efficacy of IS to complex contemporary IS, while at the same time providing a benchmark for organizations to track their user expertise. The validation involved three separate studies, including exploratory and confirmatory phases, using data from 244 respondents.

Modelling the information seeking user by the decision they make

The article focuses on how the information seeker makes decisions about relevance. It will employ a novel decision theory based on quantum probabilities. This direction derives from mounting research within the field of cognitive science showing that decision theory based on quantum probabilities is superior to modelling human judgements than standard probability models [2, 1]. By quantum probabilities, we mean decision event space is modelled as vector space rather than the usual Boolean algebra of sets. In this way,incompatible perspectives around a decision can be modelled leading to an interference term which modifies the law of total probability. The interference term is crucial in modifying the probability judgements made by current probabilistic systems so they align better with human judgement. The goal of this article is thus to model the information seeker user as a decision maker. For this purpose, signal detection models will be sketched which are in principle applicable in a wide variety of information seeking scenarios.

An ontology-based method for sparsity problem in tag recommendation

Tags or personal metadata for annotating web resources have been widely adopted in Web 2.0 sites. However, as tags are freely chosen by users, the vocabularies are diverse, ambiguous and sometimes only meaningful to individuals. Tag recommenders may assist users during tagging process. Its objective is to suggest relevant tags to use as well as to help consolidating vocabulary in the systems. In this paper we discuss our approach for providing personalized tag recommendation by making use of existing domain ontology generated from folksonomy. Specifically we evaluated the approach in sparse situation. The evaluation shows that the proposed ontology-based method has improved the accuracy of tag recommendation in this situation.

Unpacking ‘lessons learned’ : investigating failures and considering alternative solutions

One of the most common ways to share project knowledge is to capture the positive and negative aspects of projects in the form of lessons learned (LL). If effectively used, this process can assist project managers in reusing project knowledge and preventing future projects from repeating mistakes. Nevertheless, the process of capturing, storing, reviewing and reusing LL often remains suboptimal. Despite the potential for rich knowledge capture, lessons are often documented as simple, line-item statements devoid of context. Findings from an empirical investigation across four cases revealed a range of reasons related to the perceived quality, process and visibility of LL that lead to their limited use and application. Drawn from the cross-case analysis, this paper investigates an integrated approach to LL involving the use of a collaborative Web-based tool, which is easily accessible, intelligible and user-friendly, allowing more effective sharing of project knowledge and overcoming existing problems with LL.

A concept-based retrieval method for entity-oriented search

Entity-oriented retrieval aims to return a list of relevant entities rather than documents to provide exact answers for user queries. The nature of entity-oriented retrieval requires identifying the semantic intent of user queries, i.e., understanding the semantic role of query terms and determining the semantic categories which indicate the class of target entities. Existing methods are not able to exploit the semantic intent by capturing the semantic relationship between terms in a query and in a document that contains entity related information. To improve the understanding of the semantic intent of user queries, we propose concept-based retrieval method that not only automatically identifies the semantic intent of user queries, i.e., Intent Type and Intent Modifier but introduces concepts represented by Wikipedia articles to user queries. We evaluate our proposed method on entity profile documents annotated by concepts from Wikipedia category and list structure. Empirical analysis reveals that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches.

Measurement, modelling and capacity analysis for novel, fixed multi-user single-antenna MIMO-OFDM system, in rural environments

High-speed broadband internet access is widely recognised as a catalyst to social and economic development. However, the provision of broadband Internet services with the existing solutions to rural population, scattered over an extensive geographical area, remains both an economic and technical challenge. As a feasible solution, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) proposed a highly spectrally efficient, innovative and cost-effective fixed wireless broadband access technology, which uses analogue TV frequency spectrum and Multi-User MIMO (MUMIMO) technology with Orthogonal-Frequency-Division-Multiplexing (OFDM). MIMO systems have emerged as a promising solution for the increasing demand of higher data rates, better quality of service, and higher network capacity. However, the performance of MIMO systems can be significantly affected by different types of propagation environments e.g., indoor, outdoor urban, or outdoor rural and operating frequencies. For instance, large spectral efficiencies associated with MIMO systems, which assume a rich scattering environment in urban environments, may not be valid for all propagation environments, such as outdoor rural environments, due to the presence of less scatterer densities. Since this is the first time a MU-MIMO-OFDM fixed broadband wireless access solution is deployed in a rural environment, questions from both theoretical and practical standpoints arise; For example, what capacity gains are available for the proposed solution under realistic rural propagation conditions?. Currently, no comprehensive channel measurement and capacity analysis results are available for MU-MIMO-OFDM fixed broadband wireless access systems which employ large scale multiple antennas at the Access Point (AP) and analogue TV frequency spectrum in rural environments. Moreover, according to the literature, no deterministic MU-MIMO channel models exist that define rural wireless channels by accounting for terrain effects. This thesis fills the aforementioned knowledge gaps with channel measurements, channel modeling and comprehensive capacity analysis for MU-MIMO-OFDM fixed wireless broadband access systems in rural environments. For the first time, channel measurements were conducted in a rural farmland near Smithton, Tasmania using CSIRO's broadband wireless access solution. A novel deterministic MU-MIMO-OFDM channel model, which can be used for accurate performance prediction of rural MUMIMO channels with dominant Line-of-Sight (LoS) paths, was developed under this research. Results show that the proposed solution can achieve 43.7 bits/s/Hz at a Signal-to- Noise Ratio (SNR) of 20 dB in rural environments. Based on channel measurement results, this thesis verifies that the deterministic channel model accurately predicts channel capacity in rural environments with a Root Mean Square (RMS) error of 0.18 bits/s/Hz. Moreover, this study presents a comprehensive capacity analysis of rural MU-MIMOOFDM channels using experimental, simulated and theoretical models. Based on the validated deterministic model, further investigations on channel capacity and the eects of capacity variation, with different user distribution angles (θ) around the AP, were analysed. For instance, when SNR = 20dB, the capacity increases from 15.5 bits/s/Hz to 43.7 bits/s/Hz as θ increases from 10° to 360°. Strategies to mitigate these capacity degradation effects are also presented by employing a suitable user grouping method. Outcomes of this thesis have already been used by CSIRO scientists to determine optimum user distribution angles around the AP, and are of great significance for researchers and MU-MUMO-OFDM system developers to understand the advantages and potential capacity gains of MU-MIMO systems in rural environments. Also, results of this study are useful to further improve the performance of MU-MIMO-OFDM systems in rural environments. Ultimately, this knowledge contribution will be useful in delivering efficient, cost-effective high-speed wireless broadband systems that are tailor-made for rural environments, thus, improving the quality of life and economic prosperity of rural populations.

On facilitating regional integration and economic development with collaborative technologies in the South Pacific

The current global economic instability and the vulnerability of small island nations are providing the impetus for greater integration between the countries of the South Pacific region. This exercise is critical for their survival in today’s turbulent economic environment. Past efforts of regional integration in the South Pacific have not been very successful. Reasons attributed to this outcome include issues related to damage of sovereignty, and lack of a shared integration infrastructure. Today, the IT resources with collaborative capacities provide the opportunity to develop a shared IT infrastructure to facilitate integration in the South Pacific. In an attempt to develop a model of regional integration with an IT-backed infrastructure, we identify and report on the antecedents of the current stage of regional integration, and the stakeholders’ perceived benefits of an IT resources backed regional integration in the South Pacific. Employing a case study based approach, the study finds that while most stakeholders were positive about the potential of IT-backed regional integration, significant challenges exist that hinder the realisation of this model. The study finds that facilitating IT-backed regional integration requires enabling IT infrastructure, equitable IT development in the region, greater awareness on the potential of the modern IT resources, market liberalisation of the information and telecommunications sector and greater political support for IT initiatives.

Vision-based estimation of airborne target pseudobearing rate using hidden Markov model filters

The problem of estimating pseudobearing rate information of an airborne target based on measurements from a vision sensor is considered. Novel image speed and heading angle estimators are presented that exploit image morphology, hidden Markov model (HMM) filtering, and relative entropy rate (RER) concepts to allow pseudobearing rate information to be determined before (or whilst) the target track is being estimated from vision information.