CSI 4900 Projects
Gilbert Arbez, ing.
If you are interested in any of these projects, please send and e-mail to: garbez@uottawa.ca.
EDUSCIENCE
The WEB site EDUSCIENCES aims to combine the best features of online learning and classroom to provide students with a rich learning environment with a wide range of scientific activities, and ways to develop their understanding of scientific concepts, acquire scientific methods of investigation and to exercise their autonomy, reflection and critical thinking. The blended learning activities offered on the EDUSCIENCES Web Site are based on sound pedagogical methods and supported with a virtual lab experiments. The site will allow teachers to enrol their students to choose and plan activities according to the science curriculum objectives, oversee the progress of their students, while providing these teachers with the means to assess their students' progress in learning science. In this regard, we aim to offer an online platform EDUSCIENCES for science teachers where they can conceive and implement in their classrooms science activities and thus develop the educational, scientific and technological skills to succeed in the science classroom integration activities required of the new high school science programs in Ontario.
The current version of EDUSCIENCES supports a number of roles to manage accounts, develop learning activities, and support teaching using the learning activities. The WEB based system was developed using the Kahona framework, PHP, Javascript, MySQL database, and the ffmpeg tool (for manipulating videos). PHPUnit was used in testing the system. Future work is required to improve and add features to the system; in particular the learning activity development has been assigned to the administrator role. This function needs to be migrated to a separate role, that is, define a developer account. As well a new role, the evaluator account, is required to support the evaluation of activities. The Scrum framework, an agile project management framework, shall be used to manage this project.
Modelling and Simulation
Animation Toolbox
Discrete event modelling and simulation based on the activity object world view is supported by the Java package ABSmod/J. A tool box approach is used to support the development of simulation programs in Java as part of a DEDS (Discrete-Event Dynamic System) modelling and simulation project; such projects model and simulate a real system in order to solve some problem (improve performance, increase profits, etc.). The current ABSmod/J package provides a toolbox that supports the creation of a discrete event simulation program and another toolbox with analysis functions to support experimentation and analysis of output data produced by a simulation program.
The addition of an animation toolbox to ABSmod/J is required. An important step in the development of the simulation program is verification (and validation). Currently this is being accomplished by generating a text log that shows how the state of the model is changed by the execution of the events during simulation runs. Adding an animation toolbox to ABSmod/J would provide a visual GUI to trace and visualise simulation runs to help verify and validate the simulation program. The tool box shall provide a template GUI with existing elements to control the execution of a simulation run. The template shall be extendable to allow the model developer the complete the GUI to reflect and report on the specific model being implemented in the simulation program.