Jen's Thesis Log
Part I.
Application (Smart Desk and Experiment Tools)
- Smart Desk HTML & Javascript pages:Introduction,
Manual, Explanation, Contact-information, etc. Contents are categorized
under subjects(color, language, memory, match, math, drawing etc) after the
main page.
![](gate_SD.gif)
Figure 1. Applet Interface of Smart Desk
main page.
From here, you can choose options to
proceed. There is a non-applet version for web browsers which do not support
Java.
-
Java
Applets (contents of Smart Desk):
Concentration
Card game: It is a computer version of memory game. For the
cognitive purposes, color of cards and back grounds can be selected. Also
the number of cards and contents of cards (shapes, colors, images, or words)
are selectable. User behavior during playing the game is recorded and shown
as graphs after the session. Number of clicks on each cards, time taken
between each mouse click, and mouse trajectory are examples of such graphs.
Sequences: A sequence of shapes are listed
at the top of screen. Then a user is required to choose the same shape in
the same sequence one by one. A pool of shapes are provided at the same
screen, of course. Right and wrong answers are tracked with time information
and mouse information(I think).
Drawing applets:one
is to draw figures and the other one is to ask a user to fill a shape.
Percentage of "in-the-shape-fill" and
"fill-out-of-the-shape" is calculated.
Objects(Math-geometry):3-D objects of rectangle, triangle,
and line in two levels. Basic user tracking exists.
Sound-Card: These applets are working with special hardware. At a
screen, scanned cards images
are displayed[figure 2]. Those are words-images cards. For example, the word
allegator and a cartoon image of an allegator are drawn on each side of a
card. The applet itself is working by getting keyboard events, but at the
siggraph, slots and real cards were used. A user choose a card of allegator
and if she puts into the right slot (there were 3 and 3 cards at the screen
too), this applet will make some sound of UFO and flip the card.(well.
reinforcement!) The other applet is
about shapes again. There are cylinder, triangular-prism, and a
square pillar as real wooden objects. And there is a station with holes of
triangle, square, and circle. Only when a user chooses a right object for
the hole, the object will click the switch at the bottom of the hole and
make a signal back to the applet through TNG3 interface.
![](hw_card.gif)
<Figure 2>
Learning Signs:Road signs and other safety signs
(for social functions) are scanned and by clicking each of thumbnail, a user
sees a bigger image. Its functionality is simple and needs to be improved if
needed.
Choosing the same
Object:An object is at the left-hand side and there are 4 objects
including the object at the right-hand side of the screen. Right and wrong
answers are recorded.
Basically above applets have user tracking methods. It
was fairly straightfoward because Java applet itself is event-driven, and
once I wrote classes for that, I just needed to re-use them. Problem is with
non-java applications and the problem is solved by using Neattool process as
a back ground process. Or perhaps writing a little stand-alone program only
to measure user events at local machine will be a possible and light-weight
solution.
- ShockWave
.DCR files:
Drawing, learning shapes, learning
Colors, learning phrases, choosing the same shape, etc. are available. To
track user inputs for those, additional process is required. I read
somewhere that DCR files are planned to communicate with Java some time ago,
though.
- Perl
Script written for experiment purposes:
stat.pl: it
calculates number of hits per second, transferred data per seconds, total
data, total transaction time, and average transferred data per ransaction
all.pl: it adds up number of files and amounts of files
at the entire web sites and classifies different extensions such as .html,
.class, or .dcr.
personalize.pl:this is to create a
new personalized SD.
document_map.pl:a interface to
generate the new personalized SD. Data is transferred to personalize.pl
script.
Above scripts are not linked to the SD environment.
stat.pl and all.pl are operated on Unix meanwhile other two are web based
interfaces. Those were created for experiment.
- Java
applet to generate a graph.: This applet is described in my dissertation
too. It shows a list of dimension and when a user checks boxes and assigns
"weight" to each elements of each dimension, it generates a graph.
- Registration and Personalization forms: User registration data and
personalization information are sent back to Oracle database. Currently, I
don't think that database account is still working but surely it can be up
and running by changing a servlet code.
I might have missed some. Let me update when I think of
more.
Part II Event , Exhibition and Demo
We had a couple of open house at the center, and Smart Desk
Demo was shown.
And participated and exhibited Smart
Desk at Super Computing 96 and Siggraph 98.
Julie was a
real user back in 96.
Hosted Smart Desk camp at the
center in 97.
Current: Rather than developing
application, I've been looking for ways to develop a theoretical model to
explain a web based (interactive) learning environment in computer science point
of view.
Part III. Modeling
I took a Discrete Event System class in 96 and that
provided me general understanding and guideline of how to model a discrete event
system. I viewed SmartDesk as an instance of DES. Also I focused on
interactivity issue specifically. (I do think the link between the modeling
itself and interactivity measurement is kind of weak. Partially , that is
because I had to choose one variable anyway and just chose one.)
To provide legitimacy of the learning system and
interactivity features, education and psychology literature were reviewed. They
could provide good empirical and theoretical frame.
Interactivity issues in general was researched. In CMC(computer mediated
communication) settings, interactivity issue is hot. In web design guideline,
they abuse the term often, and I decided to emphasize the diffrence between
'accessability' and 'interactivity'.
Part
IV. Experiment for New Chapter
User tracking
will be more emphasized. As of August 6th, recording module of NeatTools is used
to record and replay user trajectory. The record file shows type of inputs and
time information. The infomation will be analyzed. Also I had been
implementing user tracking and analyzing of the information and didn't include
in my previous thesis draft. That part will be added to either smart desk
chapter or interactivity chapter.
UserTracking at SmartDesk
environment