2009 Publications | Publicações de 2009 (II)

OK, here's the first part of this series, as mentioned in the previous post.

The year started out nicely with three papers by my doctoral students and co-supervisors:

Esteves, Micaela; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). Contextualization of Programming Learning: A Virtual Environment Study. In Proceedings of the 38th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 22 – 25, 2008, Saratoga Springs, NY, pp. 17-22, ISBN 978-1-4244-1970-8. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE.

Esteves, Micaela; Antunes, Ricardo; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). Using Second Life in Programming's Communities of Practice. In LNCS 5411, Proceedings of CRIWG 08, 14th Collaboration Researchers' International Workshop on Groupware, Omaha, Nebraska, September 14-18, 2008. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Micaela has been doing a great job, determining how Second Life's environment can be used to introduce college students to programming. These two papers detail the ongoing developments of her field work. (An upcoming paper at the British Journal of Educational Technology will put everything in perspective, presenting an overall framework, but these papers have the hard details.)

Santos, Filipe; Fonseca, Benjamim; Morgado, Leonel; Martins, Paulo (2009). A Version Control System as a tool and methodology to foster children’s collaboration in spatial configuration decision tasks. In LNCS 5411, Proceedings of CRIWG 08, 14th Collaboration Researchers' International Workshop on Groupware, Omaha, Nebraska, September 14-18, 2008. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Filipe's work has been, delightfully, a case study of how a nice idea can in turn generate something even nicer, unexpectedly. He started by developing a system for children to be able to compare different spatial organizations of objects in a playground (you can see a video at http://www.amelia-project.org/), and this in turn led to the creation and development of the concept of a different kind of version-control system: not just a "3D wiki", was we affectuosly called it originally, but a multi-linear version control system, with a visual interface that renders it easy to use. Filipe is now finishing his thesis, but this idea will likely be developed into a couple of excellent papers to be submitted in 2010.