This paper describes an empirical study of fun, usability, and learning in educational software. Twenty Wve children aged 7 and 8 from an English primary school participated. The study involved three software products that were designed to prepare children for government initiated science tests. Pre and post tests were used to measure the learning eVect, and observations and survey methods were...

This mini-course gives an introduction to the techniques used in experimental particle physics with an emphasis on the impact of technological advances. The basic detector types and particle accelerator facilities will be briefly covered with examples of their use and with comparisons. The mini-course ends with what can be expected in the near future from current technology advances. The minico...

The volume shadowing team achieved a high-quality, accelerated delivery of volume shadowing on OpenVMS AXP by applying techniques from academic and industry literature to Digital's commercial setting. These techniques were an assessment of the team process to identify deficiencies, formal inspections to detect most porting defects before testing, and principles of experimental design in the tes...

Traditional engineering design discipline calls for designs to be evaluated long before they are implemented. Early design evaluations predict properties of the artifact that will result from a proper implementation of the design and the value of those properties to the client or end user. The predicted properties can include costs as well as functionality, performance, and quality measures. So...

Early education is a key element for the future success of students in the education system. This work analyzes the feasibility of using augmented reality contents with preschool students (four and five years old) as a tool for improving their learning process. A quasi experimental design based on a nonequivalent groups posttest-only design was used. A didactic unit has been developed around th...

This paper proposes a research methodology, Lab-based Action Design Research, which combines organizational intervention (action research), building innovative artifacts (engineering research) and studies of software development practice (behavioral research) within a laboratory environment. Seven principles for successful Lab-based Action Design Research are proposed – attract funding with a w...

the set covering problem (scp) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. this paper investigates development of a local branching approach for the scp. this solution strategy is exact in nature, though it is designed to improve the heuristic behavior of the mixed integer programming solver. the algorithm parameters are tuned by design of experiments approach. the proposed method is te...

One method suggested for improving software quality has been that of collecting metric scores for a given design, and refactoring in response to what are deemed to be unsatisfactory metric values. More recently, the usage of design patterns has been recommended to promote adaptable designs, so reducing maintenance e€ort. These two approaches are therefore observed to e€ectively have the same ge...

Recently we have witnessed a welcomed increase in the amount of empirical evaluation of Software Engineering methods and concepts. It is hoped that this increase will lead to establishing Software Engineering as a well-deened subject with a sound scientiically proven underpinning rather than a topic based upon unsubstantiated theories and personal belief. For this to happen the empirical work m...