During at least one afternoon each month, Wilmette (Illinois) Public Library (WPL) hosts a local group of computer programmers, designers, and artists, who meet to discuss digital projects and resources, technical challenges, and successful design or programming strategies. WPL's Game Design Club, now in its third year, owes its existence to a…

European cooperation is a relevant subject that contributes to building a competitive network of high education institutions. A case of teacher mobility on behalf of the Erasmus programme is presented: it considers some Operations Research topics and the development of the Lego on My Decision module. The module considers eight lecture hours in…

In this paper, a video streaming system for education based on a wireless mesh network is proposed. A wireless mesh network is a self-organizing, self-managing and reliable intelligent network, which allows educators to deploy a network quickly. Video streaming plays an important role in this system for multimedia data transmission. This new…

This article explores different approaches that facilitate online collaboration. The newest efforts in collaboration revolve around wikis. These websites allow visitors to add, remove, edit, and change content directly online. Another fairly affordable approach involves open source, a programming language that is, in many ways, collaborative…

In this paper, we summarize our experiences from teaching a course in humanoid robotics at Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden. We describe the robotic platform used in the course and we propose the use of a custom-built robot consisting of standard electronic and mechanical components. In our experience, by using standard…

"Scratch" is a media-rich digital environment that utilises a building block command structure to manipulate graphic, audio, and video aspects. It incorporates elements of Logo including "tinkerability" in the programming process. In "Scratch" students use geometric and measurement concepts such as coordinates, angle,…

A common problem in computer programming use for education in general, not simply as a technical skill, is that children and teachers find themselves constrained by what is possible through limited expertise in computer programming techniques. This is particularly noticeable at the preliterate level, where constructs tend to be limited to…

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new computing paradigm that has been adopted by major computer companies as well as government agencies such as the Department of Defense for mission-critical applications. SOC is being used for developing Web and electronic business applications, as well as robotics, gaming, and scientific applications. Yet,…

Computer programming in undergraduate engineering education all too often begins and ends with the freshman programming course. Improvements in computer technology and curriculum revision have improved this situation, but often at the expense of the students' learning due to the use of commercial "black box" software. This paper describes the…

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Library, where the author serves as the digital services librarian, is increasingly challenged to make it easier for users to find information from many heterogeneous information sources. Information is scattered throughout different software applications (i.e., library catalog, federated search engine, link…

In order to improve the quality of technology instruction, the Career and Technical Education (CTE) Business Department in the Spokane Public School district has aligned its Computer Applications (CA) course to the district's ninth-grade Springboard (Language Arts) curriculum, Algebra I curriculum, and the Culminating Project (senior project)…

In this paper, we propose a grouping strategy to enhance the learning and testing results of students, called Pairing Strategy (PS). The proposed method stems from the need of interactivity and the desire of cooperation in cooperative learning. Based on the social networks of students, PS provides members of the groups to learn from or mimic…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

Programming is a fundamental skill for Information Systems and Information Technology students. It is also a subject that some students fear, avoid, fail, retake, and fail again. An effective, inexpensive, one-semester approach is presented. Early indications suggest dramatically improved student interest and performance compared to our previous…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently announced a proposal that will require all public companies to report their financial data in Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). XBRL is an extension of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Moving to a standard reporting format makes it easier for organizations to report the…