Conference Session

Tablet and Portable PCs for Education

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

David Bowman, Clemson University; Lisa Benson, Clemson University

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

Use on Facilitating Student InteractionsAbstractThe objective of this study is to examine how Tablet PCs affect the interaction between studentswhen working in pairs on in-class assignments, and to study the effects of shared Tablet PC useon learning. Prior studies have demonstrated that engaging students in the learning processthrough active discussion and/or problem-solving with their peers improves learning. Tablet PCsallow students to engage in learning activities while using unique digital Inking and sharingcapabilities.In this pilot study, significant differences were observed between students working on paper andTablet PCs (“Paper” and “Tablet,” respectively) in terms of the frequency of observations

Conference Session

Computer Education Innovations

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Thomas Cochrane, University of Canterbury

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

technical material. To tackle this problem and improve presentation skills, aprogram called Virtual-i Presenter (ViP) was created. ViP allows students to create, review, andevaluate oral presentations using a webcam and a PowerPoint presentation outside of lecturetime and still receive peer and academic feedback. The program has NO video or audio editingcapabilities and thus the presentation becomes closer to how live presentations are given. ViPfeatures a system to evaluate presentations, enabling the presenter to receive both technical andpresentation skills feedback from peers and lecturers. ViP was successfully tested in classes of19 natural resources and 78 civil engineering students. Survey results showed that studentsrepeated (practiced

Conference Session

Programming for Engineering Students I

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Christiaan Gribble, Grove City College

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

primitives such as barriers, locks, and higher-level constructs can beconstructed using pthreads mutexes. Primitive mechanisms for inter-thread communication viashared data structures are available as well.In general, the pthreads execution model treats threads as peers. Only the main thread, which iscreated by the operating system when it instantiates the multithreaded process, has slightlydifferent properties, but these differences can typically be ignored: all of the threads in well-designed pthreads program will thus cooperate to execute the task at hand in a manner thateffectively utilizes the underlying resources of the processor. Page

Conference Session

Robots in Education

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

David Ahlgren, Trinity College; Igor Verner, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

. For the team tosucceed, one or more students must develop mastery of each subject. Moreover, the team canprovide a learning environment and a social setting that promote peer instruction and offeropportunities to develop mastery.In this paper we describe a two-year program aimed at promoting self-efficacy amongundergraduate engineering students at Trinity College. The goal of this work was to develop andevaluate a new framework for developing mastery, to test and evaluate our framework, and tosuggest areas for further investigation. In our study, the independent variable is the teachingmethod, and the dependent variable is self-efficacy. As a method to address the self-efficacyissue, we propose individual or small group mastery projects that

Conference Session

Software and Hardware for Educators II

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Joseph Tront, Virginia Tech; Kimberly Filer, Virginia Tech; Glenda Scales, Virginia Tech; Jane Prey, Microsoft Research

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

used to input standard mouse-typecommands as well as gesture commands and electronic ink drawings. These combined featureshold the promise of facilitating dynamic and broadly informed faculty presentations while at thesame time allowing students to be more natural in their learning tasks such as note-taking andpeer to peer collaboration.Several software packages are available to support the pedagogical needs of the engineeringclassroom as well as typical engineering group collaborative environments. These packages alsoallow for a highly interactive environment with both teacher-student and student-student bi-directional real-time interactions. This paper describes some faculty experiences using tablet-focused tools such as Classroom Presenter

Conference Session

Tablet and Portable PCs for Education

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Ricky Castles, Virginia Tech; Eric Scott, Virginia Tech; Jenny Lo, Virginia Tech; Vinod Lohani, Virginia Tech

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

training for the graders, primarily to go over the provided instructionaldocument and to answer any questions they had about the process.Environmental BenefitAs was previously mentioned, approximately 1,400 students submitted their homeworkassignments electronically, instead of in a paper format, each weekfor 14 weeks.Assignmentsvaried in length ranging from a single-page submission up to about ten pages. The number ofpages used is dependent on many factors including the size of each student’s writing and theirverbosity, but it is estimated that on average students submitted about 5 pages for eachhomework assignment. By simple multiplication it can be determined that the paper savings by

Conference Session

Robots in Education

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Ryan Meuth, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Paul Robinette, Missouri University of Science and Technology; Donald Wunsch, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Tagged Divisions

Computers in Education

PresentationsBasic robotics education available online is very lacking. WikiBooks is an online community forcreating a free library of textbooks that anyone can edit.A Robotics WikiBook (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Robotics) has been started, but work on itseems to have stalled; several basic sections are still unwritten. Each student picked oneunwritten section and wrote a comprehensive study on the topic. Each student joined a group of3-4 other students to form a peer editing group. Students also presented their topic to the classand then submitted their work to the instructors after revisions. Students were expected to followWikiBooks' policies while contributing their work to the WikiBook.This project generated over 20 new pages on the Robotics