COMP5047 Projects

edit The role of the project in your learning

This unit has two key aspects:

theory, principles and techniques you learn in seminars and studios - these deal with the design, technical aspects and evaluation of pervasive computing systems;
a small group project where you put these into practice.

So, you take lessons beyond the seminar material, classroom discussion and small exercises and learning activities. You put them into practice as part of tackling a problem.

edit Team roles and learning opportunities

To take account of students' different backgrounds and aspirations, the group project aims to enable each student to take on the right role for them. So, for example, if you prefer technical aspects, such as the Andriod programming, the project enables you to put more time into those. Meanwhile, others in your group can focus on other aspects. To ensure that groups are formed appropriately, you need to indicate your preferred roles in the group formation form.

Deliverables for assessment

The following is a brief summary of each of these. The seminars will describe the detailed grading criteria, including explanation of the grading sheets. There will also be opportunities for questions and clarifications.

edit Proposal (due Week 3)

All written assessment material will be lodged on your group's trac site (to be set up in Week 2). The proposal will be a wiki page on your group trac site. For each person in the group, it will list:

their tasks, described in terms of design, technical and evaluation aspects;
and a 100-200 word description of what they will actually do.

You will be given feedback, particularly on the appropriateness of the scope.

edit Draft Report (due Week 9) and Final Report (due Week 13)

The group report will be a wiki page on a link at the top of the main trac wiki page. This will begin with the Executive Summary - maximum length 500 words - summarising the goals and achievements. Each claimed achievement will link to wiki pages with the evidence for the claim.

The individual report has a similar form: a single trac wiki page, linked from the main trac wiki page, based on the Executive Summary (maximum length 500 words) summarising that person's tasks and achievements, with links to the details on other wiki pages. Links will include ALL work actually done, such as code, prototypes, design materials, user questionnaires...

The feedback on the draft report should help you refine and improve it for the final report.

edit Presentation (Week 12)

This is given in the studio class. It is your opportunity to share with the class the goals of the project and the progress by each team member on their own part. Each team member must present their own part of the project.

The time limit is 5 minutes plus 2 minutes per person in the group. For example, a group of 5 would have 5 + (5 * 2) = 15 minutes. There is a penalty for being stopped for going over time. You should practice the presentation together and decide on a way to ensure you stay to time.

Last change: Thu Oct 13 10:04:58 2011

edit trac sites

‒ Health01
‒ Health02
‒ Health03
‒ Mlearn01
‒ Mlearn02

edit Project Theme

The project theme is Personal Digital Ecosystems for Sustained Learning. So it will help people with long term learning tasks and it will make use of rich collections of devices in a person's digital ecosystem of devices, including mobile devices such as an Android phone or iphone, embedded devices such as tabletops and wall displays and fixed devices such as desktops. Group will select the particular domain to tackle.

edit Elements of the project

Design:

refining understanding of the nature of the problem, based on analytical approaches such as CATWOE analysis, defining scenarios, personas;
low fidelity prototypes and their evaluation to inform design;
careful Focus Group studies to identify what people believe would be useful to them, what their current practice is and how they respond to particular approaches;
exploring long-term, lifelong, informal learning approaches that would enable the user to learn relevant information such as ergonomics, activity, exercise, physiology, anatomy, where the user can exploit time available when waiting for friends, for a bus, commuting....;
exploring more formal learning approaches for use as part of school or university education;
exploring roles for social media and social networks and other similar approaches that an individual can use to gain support from one or more other people.

Implementation:

using the Personis user modelling framework to create long term models about the user to support their learning;
creating an Android application that enables the user to readily record useful information;
and Android applications to provide suitable displays of information;
other ambient or mobile displays, such as a subtle "blue dot" at suitable places in the user's digital and broader environment;
other ways to gather relevant information, directly from the user (such as when they are working at their computer, something that can be detected with an activity monitor that tracks mouse and keyboard activity);
tabletop applications to collaborate on aspects of this task, to share relevant information with other people, refine understanding of relevant information (such as in collaborative concept mapping);
using backend infrastructure that can hold the relevant information (subject of seminar and studio).

Interface Evaluation:

User based approaches such as Think-aloud evaluations and Laboratory Studies;
No-user approaches such as Cognitive Walk through, Heuristic Evaluation and GOMS;
Field trials.

Reading relevant literature and linking this to the chosen aspects including

set class readings;
additional readings on the Readings page;
other literature, identified from the references on the above, citations of the above, other work by people on the above, broader research;
conducting a meta-analysis such as studying and categorising relevant techniques based on all papers in 3-5 or more years of Pervasive or Ubicomp conferences.

The team as a whole will agree on a rich set of these so that each group member has been allocated different but complementary ones. This will be stated in the Proposal. The tutor and lecturer will help ensure that a good choice has been made. Some will involve programming a mobile phone applications and programming for the long term modelling of the user. Others will place their primary focus on design or evaluation.