Spreadsheets have long played a key role in business operations. The use and adoption of data analytics has significantly increased over the last few years and amplified this role. Spreadsheets are often a first tool for data analytics as such applications provide ease of calculation of basic statistics and chart development. For much of the last…

Estimote Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons deployed throughout a university campus enabled the creation of interactive tours for prospective and accepted students at Fall and Spring open house events. By configuring their mobile devices with an app to detect the beacons' signals, participants could view webpages containing information based on…

Information systems capstone projects aim to prepare students for what they will encounter in the industry after graduation. Corporate application development is often a complex endeavor that requires coordination between related products. For example, software development in the mobile application sector may require a coordinated parallel…

The use of cloud computing services has grown dramatically in post-secondary institutions in the last decade. In particular, universities have been attracted to the low-cost and flexibility of acquiring cloud software services from Google, Microsoft and others, to implement e-mail, calendar and document management and other basic office software.…

Teaching programming and mobile application development concepts can be challenging for instructors; however, teaching an interdisciplinary class with varied skill levels amplifies this challenge. To encompass a broad range of students, many instructors have sought to improve their lessons and methods by experimenting with group/team programming.…

In this paper, we report on our experience as rookies organizing, funding, and running a summer computing camp for middle school girls. The focus of the camp was building mobile applications using App Inventor. The three day/two night camp targeted girls in rural, high poverty school districts and was funded through an award from the National…

Teaching game development has become an accepted methodology for introducing programming concepts and capturing the interest of beginning computer science and information technology (IT) students. This study, conducted over three consecutive semesters, explores game development using a gaming engine, rather than a traditional programming language,…

Mobile application development is currently an important component of CS/IS education. Because of the rapid rate of change in the mobile application field, there are many websites that provide instructional material in tutorial format, but it is difficult to find a textbook that includes mobile application programming assignments and exercises.…

This paper reports the results of a survey with 40 students enrolled in an Android Application Development course offered during the spring semester of 2013 and 2014. The course used App Inventor to build the apps and required students to have an introduction to programming course as a prerequisite. The survey asked for demographic information and…

Interdisciplinary teaching and interpretation of technology for various applications provides a challenging and engaging environment for students to enhance their creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. This paper presents results of a joint effort between faculty in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology and the…

This lab exercise exposes students to Evernote, which is a powerful productivity application that has gained significant purchase in professional work environments. In many academic settings the introductory computer applications course has a specific focus on standard productivity applications such as MS Word and MS Excel. While ensuring fluency…

Smartphones are fundamentally transforming almost all aspects of modern life. This case study examines moral and ethical issues surrounding the use of powerful smartphones that can be used to discreetly capture the activities of unsuspecting people. This case shows how a standard iPhone, coupled with widely available apps, can be used in a…

App Inventor has been used successfully to teach introduction to programming course for CS/IS/IT and Non-CS majors. Now, researchers are looking on how to include the tool in the curriculum of more advanced computing courses. This paper presents some Issues, Challenges and Opportunities observed while teaching courses on Mobile Application…

Instructors continually search for innovative approaches to interact with and engage students in the classroom. The tablet offers a potential innovation for this purpose. Tablet devices from Apple, Microsoft, and other hardware vendors have overcome many of the challenges of the past (e.g. cost and limited applications) to become useful tools for…

We want our students to experience system testing of both desktop and web applications, but the cost of professional system-testing tools is far too high. We evaluate several free tools and find that AutoIt makes an ideal educational system-testing tool. We show several examples of desktop and web testing with AutoIt, starting with simple…