Computer Science students who have one or more years of basic programming experience and little or no exposure to abstractions above the code level, often struggle to grasp modeling concepts and practices in more advanced software development courses. In this talk I discuss some of the factors that contribute to this situation and propose a learning process in which the abstraction gap between ...

How do people imagine the possibilities in which an assertion would be true and the possibilities in which it would be false? We argue that the mental representation of the meanings of connectives, such as “and”, “or”, and “if”, specify how to construct the true possibilities for simple assertions containing just a single connective. It follows that the false possibilities are constructed by in...

Finding a creative solution to a design problem (e.g. designing a device for taking water samples at different depths) often depends on finding a fruitful representation of the problem space. For instance, a problem space in which the device is assumed to be motor-driven might be less fruitful than one in which the mechanism for motion is not specified or could be one of several possibilities. ...

Chiral Symmetry is important in a lot of situations. In this talk I will restrict myself to consequences of Chiral Symmetry for the strong interaction. The subject is very broad as can be judged from the lectures and review articles. In its modern form it was founded by Weinberg and Gasser and Leutwyler. I will discuss a few of the basics in sects. 2, 3, 4. The applications to ππ scattering (se...

Locating accurate information on academic topics is a challenge for today’s information seekers. Whilst specialist portals exist, users have a marked preference for finding their own information yet are rarely trained in formal information searching using library resources. Further such electronic resource discovery systems are often complex or highly complicated to use. Work is underway to pro...

This study focused on the cognitive processes involved in learning from text and pictures, when learning both individually and collaboratively. We designed a task in which learners actively engage with text and pictures in a lesson about mitosis, followed by a test of knowledge gained from the task. During the task, think-aloud protocols were collected. Preliminary results show that learners ac...

PDP (Protocol Diaqnostic Program) is a proqram for analyzing think-aloud protocols of subjects solvinq elementary physics problems *. Two versions of PDP implement models of problem solving behaviour at novice and intermediate levels of expertise. In order to compare the behaviour of the models with think-aloud protocols of subjects, PDP is equiped with a think-aloud component, which communicat...

People engage in multiple types of information-seeking strategies within an information-seeking episode. The objective of this pilot study is to investigate search moves and tactics made by end-users when searching for visual information. The pilot study involves 5 undergraduate students from the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University using the AccuNet/AP Photo Archive...

Little research has addressed IT professionals’ script debugging strategies, or considered whether there may be gender differences in these strategies. What strategies do male and female scripters use and what kinds of mechanisms do they employ to successfully fix bugs? Also, are scripters’ debugging strategies similar to or different from those of spreadsheet debuggers? Without the answers to ...

There is a sharp contrast between High Resource Settings (HRSs), commonly seen in developed countries and Low Resource Settings (LRSs), typically found in the marginalised sections of societies around the world. Product design for LRSs is crucial to satisfy unmet or under-served needs of the people living in LRSs. Supporting designers to develop successful products for LRSs demands developing a...