Computer game-based and traditional learning method: a comparison regarding students’ knowledge retention

Abstract Background Educational computer games are examples of computer-assisted learning objects, representing an educational strategy of growing interest. Given the changes in the digital world over the last decades, students of the current generation expect technology to be used in advancing their learning requiring a need to change traditional passive learning methodologies to an active multisensory experimental learning methodology. The objective of this study was to compare a computer game-based learning method with a traditional learning method, regarding learning gains and knowledge retention, as means of teaching head and neck Anatomy and Physiology to Speech-Language and Hearing pathology undergraduate students. Methods Students were randomized to participate to one of the learning methods and the data analyst was blinded to which method of learning the students had received. Students’ prior knowledge (i.e. before undergoing the learning method), short-term knowledge retention and long-term knowledge retention (i.e. six months after undergoing the learning method) were assessed with a multiple choice questionnaire. Students’ performance was compared considering the three moments of assessment for both for the mean total score and for separated mean scores for Anatomy questions and for Physiology questions. Results Students that received the game-based method performed better in the pos-test assessment only when considering the Anatomy questions section. Students that received the traditional lecture performed better in both post-test and long-term post-test when considering the Anatomy and Physiology questions. Conclusions The game-based learning method is comparable to the traditional learning method in general and in short-term gains, while the traditional lecture still seems to be more effective to improve students’ short and long-term knowledge retention.

Model-based reuse for crosscutting frameworks: assessing reuse and maintenance effort

Abstract Background Over the last years, a number of researchers have investigated how to improve the reuse of crosscutting concerns. New possibilities have emerged with the advent of aspect-oriented programming, and many frameworks were designed considering the abstractions provided by this new paradigm. We call this type of framework Crosscutting Frameworks (CF), as it usually encapsulates a generic and abstract design of one crosscutting concern. However, most of the proposed CFs employ white-box strategies in their reuse process, requiring two mainly technical skills: (i) knowing syntax details of the programming language employed to build the framework and (ii) being aware of the architectural details of the CF and its internal nomenclature. Also, another problem is that the reuse process can only be initiated as soon as the development process reaches the implementation phase, preventing it from starting earlier. Method In order to solve these problems, we present in this paper a model-based approach for reusing CFs which shields application engineers from technical details, letting him/her concentrate on what the framework really needs from the application under development. To support our approach, two models are proposed: the Reuse Requirements Model (RRM) and the Reuse Model (RM). The former must be used to describe the framework structure and the later is in charge of supporting the reuse process. As soon as the application engineer has filled in the RM, the reuse code can be automatically generated. Results We also present here the result of two comparative experiments using two versions of a Persistence CF: the original one, whose reuse process is based on writing code, and the new one, which is model-based. The first experiment evaluated the productivity during the reuse process, and the second one evaluated the effort of maintaining applications developed with both CF versions. The results show the improvement of 97% in the productivity; however little difference was perceived regarding the effort for maintaining the required application. Conclusion By using the approach herein presented, it was possible to conclude the following: (i) it is possible to automate the instantiation of CFs, and (ii) the productivity of developers are improved as long as they use a model-based instantiation approach.

A holistic approach to model-based testing of Web service compositions

The behavior of composed Web services depends on the results of the invoked services; unexpected behavior of one of the invoked services can threat the correct execution of an entire composition. This paper proposes an event-based approach to black-box testing of Web service compositions based on event sequence graphs, which are extended by facilities to deal not only with service behavior under regular circumstances (i.e., where cooperating services are working as expected) but also with their behavior in undesirable situations (i.e., where cooperating services are not working as expected). Furthermore, the approach can be used independently of artifacts (e.g., Business Process Execution Language) or type of composition (orchestration/choreography). A large case study, based on a commercial Web application, demonstrates the feasibility of the approach and analyzes its characteristics. Test generation and execution are supported by dedicated tools. Especially, the use of an enterprise service bus for test execution is noteworthy and differs from other approaches. The results of the case study encourage to suggest that the new approach has the power to detect faults systematically, performing properly even with complex and large compositions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Virtual Programming Lab for Moodle with automatic assessment and anti-plagiarism features

[EN] This paper describes VPL, a Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle, developed at the University of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and released for free uses under GNU/GPL license. For the students, it is a simple development environment with auto evaluation capabilities. For the instructors, it is a students' work management system, with features to facilitate the preparation of assignments, manage the submissions, check for plagiarism, and do assessments with the aid of powerful and flexible assessment tools based on program testing, all of that being independent of the programming language used for the assignments and taken into account critical security issues.

Pattern-based segmentation of digital documents: model and implementation

This thesis proposes a new document model, according to which any document can be segmented in some independent components and transformed in a pattern-based projection, that only uses a very small set of objects and composition rules. The point is that such a normalized document expresses the same fundamental information of the original one, in a simple, clear and unambiguous way. The central part of my work consists of discussing that model, investigating how a digital document can be segmented, and how a segmented version can be used to implement advanced tools of conversion. I present seven patterns which are versatile enough to capture the most relevant documents’ structures, and whose minimality and rigour make that implementation possible. The abstract model is then instantiated into an actual markup language, called IML. IML is a general and extensible language, which basically adopts an XHTML syntax, able to capture a posteriori the only content of a digital document. It is compared with other languages and proposals, in order to clarify its role and objectives. Finally, I present some systems built upon these ideas. These applications are evaluated in terms of users’ advantages, workflow improvements and impact over the overall quality of the output. In particular, they cover heterogeneous content management processes: from web editing to collaboration (IsaWiki and WikiFactory), from e-learning (IsaLearning) to professional printing (IsaPress).

Specification, execution and verification of interaction protocols: an approach based on computational logic

Interaction protocols establish how different computational entities can interact with each other. The interaction can be finalized to the exchange of data, as in 'communication protocols', or can be oriented to achieve some result, as in 'application protocols'. Moreover, with the increasing complexity of modern distributed systems, protocols are used also to control such a complexity, and to ensure that the system as a whole evolves with certain features. However, the extensive use of protocols has raised some issues, from the language for specifying them to the several verification aspects. Computational Logic provides models, languages and tools that can be effectively adopted to address such issues: its declarative nature can be exploited for a protocol specification language, while its operational counterpart can be used to reason upon such specifications. In this thesis we propose a proof-theoretic framework, called SCIFF, together with its extensions. SCIFF is based on Abductive Logic Programming, and provides a formal specification language with a clear declarative semantics (based on abduction). The operational counterpart is given by a proof procedure, that allows to reason upon the specifications and to test the conformance of given interactions w.r.t. a defined protocol. Moreover, by suitably adapting the SCIFF Framework, we propose solutions for addressing (1) the protocol properties verification (g-SCIFF Framework), and (2) the a-priori conformance verification of peers w.r.t. the given protocol (AlLoWS Framework). We introduce also an agent based architecture, the SCIFF Agent Platform, where the same protocol specification can be used to program and to ease the implementation task of the interacting peers.

Methodological proposal for elaboration of learning materials in sing language in university teaching

[EN] Hearing impairment may constitute a barrier for accessing to information and communication in public places. Since the oral communication forms the basis of the learning process, this problem becomes of particular relevance at schools and universities. To cope with this situation is not enough to provide a textual translation for people with hearing disabilities, society via educational authorities must facilitate alternatives that improve access to information and education to this collective. According to this reality, the possibility of having an alternative tool of communication based in the Spanish Sign Language (SSL) emerges as a contribution to help overcoming the communication obstacles that the students with this difficulty usually find.

PlayingCLIL, a new game-based methodology using drama pedagogy

[EN]Linguistic immersion programs are increasing nowadays. The concept of being bilingual, that started being used by schools for the elite in the 19th century, and that in the mid- 20th century became an educational option, has given raise to CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a methodology through which students work in a bilingual environment, acquiring knowledge of curricular subject and developing their competences in a foreign language. In this teaching context started a new European project called PlayingCLIL. Six partners from different European countries (Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Romania) are working in this project. Our main aim is to develop a new methodology to learn a foreign language combining elements from the pedagogic drama (interactive games) with the CLIL classroom. At present we are testing the games in different schools and high schools and we are compiling the results to be collected in a handbook (printed and e-book).

EXAM-S: an Analysis tool for Multi-Domain Policy Sets

As distributed collaborative applications and architectures are adopting policy based management for tasks such as access control, network security and data privacy, the management and consolidation of a large number of policies is becoming a crucial component of such policy based systems. In large-scale distributed collaborative applications like web services, there is the need of analyzing policy interactions and integrating policies. In this thesis, we propose and implement EXAM-S, a comprehensive environment for policy analysis and management, which can be used to perform a variety of functions such as policy property analyses, policy similarity analysis, policy integration etc. As part of this environment, we have proposed and implemented new techniques for the analysis of policies that rely on a deep study of state of the art techniques. Moreover, we propose an approach for solving heterogeneity problems that usually arise when considering the analysis of policies belonging to different domains. Our work focuses on analysis of access control policies written in the dialect of XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language). We consider XACML policies because XACML is a rich language which can represent many policies of interest to real world applications and is gaining widespread adoption in the industry.

CLIL materials in Secondary Education: focusing on the language of instruction in the subject area of Mathematics

[EN]Applying a CLIL methodological approach marks a shift in emphasis from language learning based on linguistic form and grammatical progression to a more ‘language acquisition’ one which takes account language functions. In this article we will study the elements of the “language of instruction” of the area of Maths in Secondary Education, by focusing on the analysis of the communicative functions, and the lexical and the cultural items present in the textbook in use. Our aim is to present the CLIL teacher with the linguistic and didactic implications that he or she should take into consideration when implementing the bilingual syllabuses with their students. In order to do that, we will present our conclusions emphasizing the need for coordination in different content areas, linguistic and communicative contents, between the foreign language teacher and the CLIL subject one.

Specification and Verification of Declarative Open Interaction Models - A Logic-based framework

The advent of distributed and heterogeneous systems has laid the foundation for the birth of new architectural paradigms, in which many separated and autonomous entities collaborate and interact to the aim of achieving complex strategic goals, impossible to be accomplished on their own. A non exhaustive list of systems targeted by such paradigms includes Business Process Management, Clinical Guidelines and Careflow Protocols, Service-Oriented and Multi-Agent Systems. It is largely recognized that engineering these systems requires novel modeling techniques. In particular, many authors are claiming that an open, declarative perspective is needed to complement the closed, procedural nature of the state of the art specification languages. For example, the ConDec language has been recently proposed to target the declarative and open specification of Business Processes, overcoming the over-specification and over-constraining issues of classical procedural approaches. On the one hand, the success of such novel modeling languages strongly depends on their usability by non-IT savvy: they must provide an appealing, intuitive graphical front-end. On the other hand, they must be prone to verification, in order to guarantee the trustworthiness and reliability of the developed model, as well as to ensure that the actual executions of the system effectively comply with it. In this dissertation, we claim that Computational Logic is a suitable framework for dealing with the specification, verification, execution, monitoring and analysis of these systems. We propose to adopt an extended version of the ConDec language for specifying interaction models with a declarative, open flavor. We show how all the (extended) ConDec constructs can be automatically translated to the CLIMB Computational Logic-based language, and illustrate how its corresponding reasoning techniques can be successfully exploited to provide support and verification capabilities along the whole life cycle of the targeted systems.

Security control brought back to the user

The activity of the Ph.D. student Juri Luca De Coi involved the research field of policy languages and can be divided in three parts. The first part of the Ph.D. work investigated the state of the art in policy languages, ending up with: (i) identifying the requirements up-to-date policy languages have to fulfill; (ii) defining a policy language able to fulfill such requirements (namely, the Protune policy language); and (iii) implementing an infrastructure able to enforce policies expressed in the Protune policy language. The second part of the Ph.D. work focused on simplifying the activity of defining policies and ended up with: (i) identifying a subset of the controlled natural language ACE to express Protune policies; (ii) implementing a mapping between ACE policies and Protune policies; and (iii) adapting the ACE Editor to guide users step by step when defining ACE policies. The third part of the Ph.D. work tested the feasibility of the chosen approach by applying it to meaningful real-world problems, among which: (i) development of a security layer on top of RDF stores; and (ii) efficient policy-aware access to metadata stores. The research activity has been performed in tight collaboration with the Leibniz Universität Hannover and further European partners within the projects REWERSE, TENCompetence and OKKAM.

A Design Methodology for Computer Security Testing

The field of "computer security" is often considered something in between Art and Science. This is partly due to the lack of widely agreed and standardized methodologies to evaluate the degree of the security of a system. This dissertation intends to contribute to this area by investigating the most common security testing strategies applied nowadays and by proposing an enhanced methodology that may be effectively applied to different threat scenarios with the same degree of effectiveness. Security testing methodologies are the first step towards standardized security evaluation processes and understanding of how the security threats evolve over time. This dissertation analyzes some of the most used identifying differences and commonalities, useful to compare them and assess their quality. The dissertation then proposes a new enhanced methodology built by keeping the best of every analyzed methodology. The designed methodology is tested over different systems with very effective results, which is the main evidence that it could really be applied in practical cases. Most of the dissertation discusses and proves how the presented testing methodology could be applied to such different systems and even to evade security measures by inverting goals and scopes. Real cases are often hard to find in methodology' documents, in contrary this dissertation wants to show real and practical cases offering technical details about how to apply it. Electronic voting systems are the first field test considered, and Pvote and Scantegrity are the two tested electronic voting systems. The usability and effectiveness of the designed methodology for electronic voting systems is proved thanks to this field cases analysis. Furthermore reputation and anti virus engines have also be analyzed with similar results. The dissertation concludes by presenting some general guidelines to build a coordination-based approach of electronic voting systems to improve the security without decreasing the system modularity.

Neurolinguistic analysis: aspects of language and speech deviations in Palestinian Arabic aphasics

The characteristics of aphasics’ speech in various languages have been the core of numerous studies, but Arabic in general, and Palestinian Arabic in particular, is still a virgin field in this respect. However, it is of vital importance to have a clear picture of the specific aspects of Palestinian Arabic that might be affected in the speech of aphasics in order to establish screening, diagnosis and therapy programs based on a clinical linguistic database. Hence the central questions of this study are what are the main neurolinguistic features of the Palestinian aphasics’ speech at the phonetic-acoustic level and to what extent are the results similar or not to those obtained from other languages. In general, this study is a survey of the most prominent features of Palestinian Broca’s aphasics’ speech. The main acoustic parameters of vowels and consonants are analysed such as vowel duration, formant frequency, Voice Onset Time (VOT), intensity and frication duration. The deviant patterns among the Broca’s aphasics are displayed and compared with those of normal speakers. The nature of deficit, whether phonetic or phonological, is also discussed. Moreover, the coarticulatory characteristics and some prosodic patterns of Broca’s aphasics are addressed. Samples were collected from six Broca’s aphasics from the same local region. The acoustic analysis conducted on a range of consonant and vowel parameters displayed differences between the speech patterns of Broca’s aphasics and normal speakers. For example, impairments in voicing contrast between the voiced and voiceless stops were found in Broca’s aphasics. This feature does not exist for the fricatives produced by the Palestinian Broca’s aphasics and hence deviates from data obtained for aphasics’ speech from other languages. The Palestinian Broca’s aphasics displayed particular problems with the emphatic sounds. They exhibited deviant coarticulation patterns, another feature that is inconsistent with data obtained from studies from other languages. However, several other findings are in accordance with those reported from various other languages such as impairments in the VOT. The results are in accordance with the suggestions that speech production deficits in Broca’s aphasics are not related to phoneme selection but rather to articulatory implementation and some speech output impairments are related to timing and planning deficits.

Assessing Food Security in Selected Mediterranean Countries

Food Security has become an important issue in the international debate, particularly during the latest economic crisis. It relevant issue also for the Mediterranean Countries (MCs), particularly those of the southern shore, as they are is facing complex economic and social changes. On the one hand there is the necessity to satisfy the increasing and changing food demand of the growing population; on the other hand it is important to promote economic growth and adjust the agricultural production to food demand in a sustainable perspective. The assessment of food security conditions is a challenging task due to the multi-dimensional nature and complexity of the matter. Many papers in the scientific literature focus on the nutritional aspects of food security, while its economic issues have been addressed less frequently and only in recent times. Thus, the main objective of the research is to assess food (in)security conditions in the MCs. The study intends to identify and implement appropriate theoretical concepts and methodological tools to be used in the assessment of food security, with a particular emphasis on its economic dimension within MCs. The study follows a composite methodological approach, based on the identification and selection of a number of relevant variables, a refined set of indicators is identified by means of a two-step Principal Component Analysis applied to 90 countries and the PCA findings have been studied with particular attention to the MCs food security situation. The results of the study show that MCs have an higher economic development compared to low-income countries, however the economic and social disparities of this area show vulnerability to food (in)security, due to: dependency on food imports, lack of infrastructure and agriculture investment, climate condition and political stability and inefficiency. In conclusion, the main policy implications of food (in)security conditions in MCs are discussed.