Carefully engineered playable games can serve as vehicles for students and practitioners to learn and explore the programming of advanced computer architectures to execute applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and complex, inter-networked, distributed systems. The article presents families of playable games that are grounded in…

In spite of the goodwill and best efforts of software engineers and usability professionals, systems continue to be built and released with glaring usability flaws that are costly and difficult to fix after the system has been built. Although user interface (UI) designers, be they usability or design experts, communicate usability requirements to…

This thesis is about a design process for creating "educationally relevant" tools. I submit that the key to creating tools that are educationally relevant is to focus on ensuring a high degree of alignment between the designed tool and the broader educational context into which the tool will be integrated. The thesis presents methods and processes…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the usability of a remote learning system in its initial development phase, using a quantitative usability evaluation method through Markov models. Design/methodology/approach: The paper opted for an exploratory study. The data of interest of the research correspond to the possible accesses of users…

Software is a critical component of systems ranging from simple consumer appliances to complex health, nuclear, and flight control systems. The development of quality, reliable, and effective software solutions requires the incorporation of effective software engineering processes and leadership. Processes, approaches, and methodologies for…

Visions of future computing in residential settings often come with assumptions of seamless, well-functioning, properly configured devices and network connectivity. In the near term, however, processes of setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting are fraught with difficulties; householders regularly report these tasks as confusing, frustrating, and…

In this paper the authors analyse the design and implementation of a course about learning management systems (LMS). The course was first given in Cuba and then in Guatemala and Peru, within the project USo+I: "Universidad, Sociedad e Innovacion, Mejora de la pertinencia de la educacion en las ingenierias de Latinoamerica" financed by…

Today's hyper-connected students live in a world of instant interpersonal communications and virtually infinite access to information and educational resources. But this networked world, and the powerful learning tools it offers, has yet to penetrate the typical classroom. In many ways educational institutions are spinning their curricular wheels,…

For the thirty-fourth year, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Jacksonville, FL. A limited quantity of these Proceedings were printed and sold in both hardcopy and electronic…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…