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- GEdIL-Gamified Education Interoperability LanguagePublication . Swacha, Jakub; Paiva, José Carlos; Leal, José Paulo; Queirós, Ricardo; Montella, Raffaele; Kosta, SokolThe paper introduces Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL), designed as a means to represent the set of gamification concepts and rules applied to courses and exercises separately from their actual educational content. This way, GEdIL allows not only for an easy yet effective specification of gamification schemes for educational purposes, but also sharing them among instructors and reusing in various courses. GEdIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.
- Emerging advancements for virtual and augmented reality in healthcarePublication . Coelho, Luis; Queirós, Ricardo; Reis, Sara SeabraWithin the last few years, devices that are increasingly capable of offering an immersive experience close to reality have emerged. As devices decrease in size, the interest and application possibilities for them increase. In the healthcare sector, there is an enormous potential for virtual reality development, as this technology allows, on the one hand, the execution of operations or processes at a distance, decoupling realities; and on the other hand, it offers the possibility of simulation for training purposes, whenever there are contexts of risk to the patient or to the health professional. However, virtual reality devices and immersion in virtual environments still requires some improvement as complaints such as headaches and nausea are still common among users, and so continuous research and development is critical to progress the technology. Emerging Advancements for Virtual and Augmented Reality in Healthcare synthesizes the trends, best practices, methodologies, languages, and tools used to implement virtual reality and create a positive user experience while also discussing how to implement virtual reality into day-to-day work with a focus on healthcare professionals and related areas. The application possibilities and their impact are transversal to all areas of health and fields such as education, training, surgery, pain management, physical rehabilitation, stroke rehabilitation, phobia therapy, and telemedicine. Covering topics such as mental health treatment and virtual simulations, it is ideal for medical professionals, engineers, computer scientists, researchers, practitioners, managers, academicians, teachers, and students.
- A survey on computer programming learning environmentsPublication . Queirós, RicardoWe are assisting the rise of online coding environments as a strategy to promote youth tech employment. With the growing importance of the technology sector, these type of technical training programs give learners emergent tech skills with a big impact and relevance to the current professional market needs. In this realm, MOOCs (massive open online courses) and online coding bootcamps are two increasingly popular options for learners to improve their code development skills and find work within a relatively short amount of time. Among all the features available on these environments, one stands out, which is the code generation. This chapter aims to detail and compare the most popular solutions for both learning contexts based on several criteria such as impact and maturity, user groups, and tools and features. In the features field, the authors highlight the code generation feature as an efficient way to enhance exercise resolution.
- Magni - a framework for developing context-aware mobile applicationsPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Portela, Filipe; Machado, JoséThe advent of Internet and ubiquitous technologies has been fostering the appearance of intelligent mobile applications aware of their environment and the objects nearby. Despite its popularity, mobile developers are often required to write large and disorganized amounts of code, mixing UI with business logic and interact, in a ad-hoc fashion, with sensor devices and services. These habits hinder the code maintenance, refactoring and testing, while negatively influencing the consistency and performance of mobile applications. In this paper we present Magni as an abstract framework for the design and implementation of personalized and context-aware mobile applications. The corner stone of the framework is its architectural pattern based on the Model–View–Presenter pattern in the UI layer relying in REST services the majority of the app features. This paradigm fosters the modular design, implementing the separation of concerns concept and allowing an easier implementation of unit tests. In order to validate the framework, we present a prototype for an healthcare automotive app. The main goal of the app is to facilitate the access to health related points of interest such as hospitals, clinics and pharmacies.
- A survey on CSS preprocessorsPublication . Queirós, RicardoIn the Web realm, the adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is unanimous, being widely used for styling web documents. Despite their intensive use, this W3C specification was written for web designers with limit programming background. Thus, it lack several programming constructs, such as variables, conditional and repetitive blocks, and functions. This absence affects negatively code reuse, and consequently, the maintenance of the styling code. In the last decade, several languages (e.g. Sass, Less) appeared to extend CSS, defined as CSS preprocessors, with the ultimate goal to bring those missing constructs and to foster stylesheets structured programming. The paper provides an introductory survey on CSS Preprocessors. It gathers information on a specific set of preprocessors, categorizes them and compares their features regarding a set of predefined criteria such as: maturity, coverage and performance.
- Introdução ao desenvolvimento moderno para a WebPublication . Portela, Carlos Filipe; Queirós, Ricardo
- [Preface] Emerging trends, techniques, and tools for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) managementPublication . Queirós, Ricardo
- Fostering programming practice through gamesPublication . Paiva, José Carlos; Leal, José Paulo; Queirós, RicardoLoss of motivation is one of the most prominent concerns in programming education as it negatively impacts time dedicated to practice, which is crucial for novice programmers. Of the distinct techniques introduced in the literature to engage students, gamification, is likely the most widely explored and fruitful. Game elements that intrinsically motivate students, such as graphical feedback and game-thinking, reveal more reliable long-term positive effects, but those involve significant development effort. This paper proposes a game-based assessment environment for programming challenges, built on top of a specialized framework, in which students develop a program to control the player, henceforth called Software Agent (SA). During the coding phase, students can resort to the graphical feedback demonstrating how the game unfolds to improve their programs and complete the proposed tasks. This environment also promotes competition through competitive evaluation and tournaments among SAs, optionally organized at the end by the teacher. Moreover, the validation of the effectiveness of Asura in increasing undergraduate students’ motivation and, consequently, the practice of programming is reported.
- LearnJS - a JavaScript learning playgroundPublication . Queirós, RicardoThe JavaScript ecosystem is evolving dramatically. Nowadays, the language is no longer confined to the boundaries of the browser and is now running in both sides of the Web stack. At the same time, JavaScript it’s starting to play also an important role in desktop and mobile applications development. These facts are leading companies to massively adopt JavaScript in their Web/mobile projects and schools to augment the language spectrum among their courses curricula. Several platforms appeared in recent years aiming to foster the learning of the JavaScript language. Those platforms are mainly characterized with sophisticated UI which allow users to learn JavaScript in a playful and interactive way. Despite its apparent success, these environments are not suitable to be integrated in existent educational platforms. Beyond these interoperability issues, most of these platforms are rigid not allowing teachers to contribute with new exercises, organize the existent exercises in more suitable and modular activities to be deployed in their courses, neither keep track of student’s progress. This paper presents LearnJS as a simple and flexible platform to teach and learn JavaScript. In this platform, instructors can contribute with new exercises and combine them with expositive resources (e.g videos) to define specific course activities. These activities can be gamified with the injection of dynamic attributes to reward the most successful attempts. Finally, instructors can deploy activities in their educational platforms. On the other hand, learners can solve exercises and receive immediate feedback on their solutions through static and dynamic analyzers. Since we are in the early stages of implementation, the paper focus on the presentation of the LearnJS architecture, their main components and their data and integration models. Nevertheless, a prototype of the platform is available in a GitHub repository.
- [Preface] Code generation, analysis tools, and testing for qualityPublication . Queirós, Ricardo; Simões, Alberto; Pinto, Mário