Thursday 29 April 2010

Audio Feedback in Computing

A member of the computing division has been 'playing' with giving feedback to students and other members of staff as audio files. Trying both making recordings using either handheld recorders or Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).

The first attempt looked at giving a summary assessment feedback as an audio file, alongside individual written feedback to a group of first year students. It end up being about four minutes and was definitely more detailed than it would have been if I had written it. It had an unexpected outcome. It was recorded using a handheld recorder and my first time doing it, the volume varied as my hand moved. Some of the student's thought this was amusing, but they must have listened to it to know!
Second area was giving feedback on staff portfolio for a lecturer training course. It is good for this as the level of detail expected was quite high and one member of staff's portfolio was electronic so seemed appropriate. It was quicker and for gave more detailed feedback.

Audio feedback is not new but it there is a growing community that believe it something worth trying. A good place to start is perhaps the recent A Word In Your Ear 2009 Conference (http://research.shu.ac.uk/lti/awordinyourear2009/) or the Case Study produced for the Engineering Subject Centre.

 Audio file discussing this can be found at: http://research.shu.ac.uk/lti/awordinyourear2009/audio/013-turner-Initial-experience.mp3



Turner S (2009)"Initial experience of using audio feedback for general assignment feedback" A Word In Your Ear 2009 Sheffield Hallam University, 18 December 2009 pg 12.

Thursday 22 April 2010

Soft skills for Computer scientists: not a soft option

Within the Division of Computing, School of Science and Technology at the University of Northampton, Rashmi Dravid working closely with Andrea Duncan from DELTA-E, University of Northampton  looking at the personal development of the 'soft skills' for Computing students. This builds on and refines some earlier work by Jonathan Adams (School of Science and Technology) and Andrea on developing these soft skills in Engineering students.

As part of this project implementing the material in a web based form is being carried out by a second year computing student. Some this work is due to be presented at the "Learning Dialogues" Conference on 13th May 2010 (see http://www2.northampton.ac.uk/learningteaching/conference10/abstracts/Abstracts-006 for more detail)

Tuesday 20 April 2010

Simulation of Friction in Virtual Environments

Dr Yinghui Zhang has recently presented a paper "A Multi-asperity Surface Contact Model for the Simulation of Friction in Virtual Environments". This paper presents a new dynamic friction model for haptic rendering of friction in virtual environments. A surface contact model is proposed to efficiently represent the interactions of asperities between contacting surfaces. The simulation results show that the friction model captures most of the friction phenomena observed experimentally. Mathematical methods are also developed to determine the value of parameters by which the friction model is characterized. This parameterization provides a high level user interface and thus makes the model easier to use.

Dr Zhang can be contacted at yinghui.zhang@northampton.ac.uk.

Reference:
Zhang Y (2010) "A Multi-asperity Surface Contact Model for the Simulation of Friction in Virtual Environments"Proceedings of Virtual Reality International Conference (VRIC 2010), 7-9 April 2010, Laval, France.