International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science (IJMECS)

IJMECS Vol. 8, No. 9, Sep. 2016

Cover page and Table of Contents: PDF (size: 215KB)

Table Of Contents

REGULAR PAPERS

Integrating Apple iPads into University Computing Courses

By Jeffrey A. Stone

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.01, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

The use of mobile devices is becoming increasingly common in both society and in the K-12 environment. Products such as the Apple iPad and the Microsoft Surface, among others, have matured to a point where university faculty are striving to integrate this increasingly ubiquitous technology into the classroom and the curriculum. This paper represents a case study examining one attempt to integrate the use of tablets into five university-level computing courses during the 2015-2016 academic year. The author used a set of iPads and accompanying classroom technology (e.g. Apple TV, keyboards) in an attempt to engage students and build their problem-solving and collaborative skills. Student feedback suggests that students were engaged, and the results for the iPad’s impact on problem-solving and collaborative skills improved over the course of the year. A number of challenges were observed, including inadequate student knowledge of tablets, wireless connectivity issues, student resistance to the group learning afforded by the iPads, and keeping the tablets charged and clean. Future plans for the study intend to address the challenges uncovered, using student and instructor feedback as an impetus for future development. This paper serves as an experiential report designed to inform other faculty who may be looking into similar projects.

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Implementation of a Simple Document Repository System

By Kazuaki Kajitori Kunimasa Aoki

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.02, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

Document repository systems have been developed actively for decades and have become quite popular on the internet. Now we can recognize several typical types of document repositories and find the full-text-search functionality as a useful search method for document repositories, so we think it has some significance to show as a mile stone an implementation scheme which covers basic types and functionality of the current document repositories which have full-text-search functionality.
The basic functions covered by our scheme are: to create, read, update, delete (so called CRUD) of documents and a session control with an optional authentication. We present a description for each part of CRUD of our scheme.
We implemented a library according to our scheme and developed small document repositories using the library. Our repository library and its applications form web applications whose script language is Perl. The implementation loosely follows the MVC (Model, View, Control) model for modularity and each MVC part of the library and its application named TEST are described. We also present a description of another application of our library which the author is conducting in the department he belongs to. We show some views of these applications.
We conclude that our library works fine for the needs of building small repositories in a short time.

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A Novel Radiation Hardened Parallel IO Port for Highly Reliable Digital IC Design

By Nastaran Rajaei Ramin Rajaei

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.03, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

This article proposes a radiation hardened parallel IO port capable of tolerating radiation induced soft errors including single event upsets (SEUs) as well as single event transients (SETs). To investigate the soft error tolerance capability of the proposed design, we simulated it using the Cadence tool and showed its offered advantages. Comparing with the conventional and well-known TMR IO port, the proposed architecture results in less hardware redundancy and design cost. Through an analytical analysis, we also showed that, our design has lower failure probability than the TMR approach. It also is notable that, among the considered previous counterparts, our proposed design is the only one that is capable of tolerating both the SEUs and SETs.

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Survey on Adverse Effect of Sophisticated Integrated Development Environments on Beginning Programmers’ Skillfulness

By Alaba T. Owoseni S. A. Akanji

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.04, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

Integrated development environment as a software system that aids programmers in developing software applications quickly and effectively has been perceived to also serve as an inappropriate tool for beginning programmers when it is specially developed with some complex features. This complexity in features as perceived leaves the programmers with a double role of studying complexity found in the environment and the semantics with syntaxes of the concerned programming language. This paper categorizes few of the available integrated development environments based on program building tools that are integrated in them and also considers an experimental survey on their adverse effects on novice programmers by sampling programmers’ opinions using closed ended questionnaires. The population was randomly selected from some tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The opinions were statistically analyzed using chi square and based on the analysis, beginning programmers learning strengths are found greatly influenced by the type of integrated development environment used.

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E-Learning at Private Universities in Kurdistan Region: A Comparative Field Study

By Adnan Fadhil Zohair Al-Ameen

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.05, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

Higher education is encountering major alteration in many countries. As well, many innovative learning techniques are emerging due to the speedy growths of technology, internet and communication tools. This thrive of technology has changed various features and conceptions of the traditional learning environments. Recently, the attention has focused on electronic learning (e-learning), which is a form of education that has begun to find its way into different developing countries due to its high potential in improving the educational process. However, different real-world challenges emerged, in which they hampered the application of e-learning in developing countries. Thus, this study aims to identify the status of the actual level of e-learning application among private universities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It is believed that the results of this study will greatly ameliorate the currently utilized educational systems.

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Virtual Examination Supervision System for Nigerian Universities

By Akazue Maureen I. Ajenaghughrure Ighoyota Ben.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.06, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

Examination malpractice is a dishonest conduct by a candidate prior to examination and through the examination to attain success effortlessly. Examination malpractice is a plague that heralds severe menace for the nation and has constantly remained a bother in the Nigerian educational system. Supervising examination has been manual since the inception of examinations in Delta State University. Likewise, most of the State Universities and Federal Universities in Nigeria utilize manual supervision of examination though visit by examination supervisors. Thus, this research paper presents a virtual examination supervision system (VESS) that checks candidates who are writing examination. VESS is an information technology approach towards curbing the problem of cheating in examination hall, using computer vision motion detection technique on real-time IP-camera video stream from examination. The implementation and practical experiment of VESS was carried out in Delta State University and result analysis indicated shift in position by examinees during examination at every milliseconds, which is difficult for human eye to monitor accurately and other cases such as copying and impersonation. These further proved that VESS is a solution to mitigating examination malpractice of all kinds and protection of the invigilators. Furthermore, the stored result in VESS can be used as evidence to punish the culprit.

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Random Pattern based sequential bit (RaP-SeB) Steganography with Cryptography for Video Embedding

By Ravpreet Kaur Manish Mahajan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.07, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

Due to an aggressive development and covert transmission of the computer users over the web, the steganography is acquiring its vogue day by day. It is the method to encode the covert data in a transmission medium in a fashion that the actuality of data must remain hidden. To protect the integrity of the data over the internet becomes necessary for the high sensitivity communications or the data transfers. The steganography carries a number of options for the embedding of the secret data into the cover data. In this manuscript, we have proposed the hybrid representation for the embedding of the data, which utilizes the random pattern embedding along with the cryptography for the higher steganography security levels. The proposed model has been designed to enhance the security level by utilizing the sequential data encoding and decoding in the video data. The video embedding creates the higher level of security for the embedded data. The experimental results have been obtained in the form of the embedding capacity, mean squared error (MSE) and Bits per Pixel (BPP). The proposed model has been found to be efficient enough for the video steganography.

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Novel Approach to Solve Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP)

By Sultan A. Alhumrani Rizwan J. Qureshi

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2016.09.08, Pub. Date: 8 Sep. 2016

In this paper, resource constrained project scheduling problem is taken and solved using genetic algorithm. This algorithm solves the problem as a whole in software development, with the limited resource the project has to be scheduled to the team members. The main aim is to schedule and optimize the resource to complete the project within time. Due to resource constraint environment, the complexity of solving the algorithm increases exponentially. So the traditional methods are not suitable to solve the resource constraint problem. The Genetic Algorithm is taken to solve the multiple resource constraints project scheduling needs. This typical NP-hard problem is solved via mathematical model via genetic algorithm. Software development projects were considered to be resource constrained and project scheduling solution makes the algorithm time efficient.

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