Recent advances in genomics and structural biology have resulted in an unprecedented increase in biological data available from Internet-accessible databases. In order to help students effectively use this vast repository of information, undergraduate biology students at Drake University were introduced to bioinformatics software and databases in…

Using modeling languages is essential to the construction of educational systems based on software engineering principles and methods. Furthermore, the instructional design is undoubtedly the cornerstone of the design and development of educational systems. Although several methodologies and languages have been proposed for the specification of…

This work designs and implements a virtual digital signal processing laboratory, VDSPL. VDSPL consists of four parts: mobile agent execution environments, mobile agents, DSP development software, and DSP experimental platforms. The network capability of VDSPL is created by using mobile agent and wrapper techniques without modifying the source code…

Students in a graduate class and an undergraduate class in Information Systems completed a Web-based programmed instruction tutor that taught a simple Java applet as the first technical training exercise in a computer programming course. The tutor is a competency-based instructional system for individualized distance learning. When a student…

As part of its annual program review process, the Department of Engineering Technology at the Community College of Allegheny County, in Pennsylvania, conducted a study of computer usage in community college engineering technology programs across the nation. Specifically, the study sought to determine the types of software, Internet access, average…

Initially available from universities and individual enthusiasts, software tools to author World Wide Web pages are maturing into very feature-rich applications and are now offered by large corporations. These applications are enabling more companies to create and maintain pages themselves on the Web or on corporate Intranets. The market continues…

Automated techniques for finding plagiarism in student source code submissions have been in use for over 20 years and there are many available engines and services. This paper reviews the literature on the major modern detection engines, providing a comparison of them based upon the metrics and techniques they deploy. Generally the most common and…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

This paper presents the multimedia product for teaching Natural Sciences to 10-12 years old children. In this product three pedagogical agents, Teacher and two pupils guide the learner through the virtual environment. The inclusion of a team of pedagogical agents permits us to create a micro-model of lesson activity and gives a reliable support of…

Customer-Driven Development is a technique from the software development method called extreme Programming (XP) where customers (most importantly including end users of all levels) are closely involved in the software design and redesign process. This method of producing software suitable for customers has been adapted to help in the production of…

This paper introduces "Collage", a high-level IMS-LD compliant authoring tool that is specialized for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). Nowadays CSCL is a key trend in e-learning since it highlights the importance of social interactions as an essential element of learning. CSCL is an interdisciplinary domain, which…

The assertion that "higher order" thinking skills can be improved by learning to program computers is not a new one. The idea endures even though the empirical evidence over the years has been mixed at best. In fact, there is no reason to expect that all programming courses will have identical, or even similar, effects. Such courses typically…

Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. In this article we show how additional inference rules allows us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM elements,…

Primary school learners' first encounters with mathematics in a traditional learning environment often create lifelong "math phobia."(Papert 1980) The situation in a country emerging from an oppressive education system designed to educationally disempower the majority of the population is much worse. The typical scenario in a previously…

The education industry has obviously been influenced by the Internet revolution. Teaching and learning methods have changed significantly since the coming of the Web and it is very likely they will keep evolving many years to come thanks to it. A good example of this changing reality is the spectacular development of e-Learning. In a more…