Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

285-298

Authors: iana Turnea, Adrian Iftene, Daniela Gîfu

We live in an Internet era, with fast travel by train, car or airplane, a time when we want to do as much as possible at work and out of it, but at the same time, we don’t want to neglect our family. Today time seems to be the main culprit for our shortcomings, especially those related to family. Even if we accept the myth that time has shortened, the way we manage it is vital, knowing that we are living our lives at a much faster pace and we are overcharging ourselves. In this paper, we describe a new web application called FamilyTurn, a solution that supports families with children to organise better their time. FamilyTurn has a lot of functionalities that help reduce stress in family life, including finding an available family member to be there for their child, to synchronize the calendar of all members and to add events, etc.

331-344

Authors: Munef Abdullah Ahmed, Stefan Trausan-Matu

A difficult but important aspect of e-learning for English language speakers is teaching the Arabic language. The major task for students in this context is analyzing Arabic poetry, which differs in several aspects from the English poetry. Natural Language Processing (NLP) for poetry analysis, and especially, being excellent in finding Arabic poetic characteristics is extremely difficult. Despite the rapid progress in this area in some international languages, the analysis of classical Arabic poetry has not received a sufficient attention due to the difficulty of the Arabic language, and the difficulties of analyzing its poetic theories. In this paper, a new way of finding the characteristics of the classical Arabic poem was introduced. One of the most important characteristics of Arabic poetry is the rhythm which is considered as the crown of this type of poem. The rhyme, which is the end of the musical tone of each verse in a poem, and the types of rhyme are also important features of any poetic art. In this article, we focused on the short vowels (“dammah”, “kasra”, “fatha”, “tanween”, and “shade”), mobile and constant letters which depend on the theory that analyzes the characteristics of the classical Arabic poetry introduced by Al-Khalil bin Ahmed Al Farahidi. An analysis program was written in a Python platform, which analyzes poems and provides the aforementioned features and some statistical measures. The program will be developed for an e-learning platform, and for use in the classification and identification of classical Arabic poems.

197-215

Authors: Maria-Iuliana Dascălu, Sergean Bagis, Melania Nițu, Oana-Maria Ferche, Alin Dragoș Bogdan Moldoveanu

As (Experiential Learning Lectures) points out, there are several downsides to classical lectures that can be extended to a lot of areas of education: the fact that students tend to lose their attention as soon as lectures start (Improving Listening Skills) or that they do not take notes rigorously (Taking Notes). Both the concentration on the taught subject as well as the need for taking notes can be improved by using experiential learning techniques. According to (Experiential Learning, Illinois), these techniques require the student to use his critical, reflective and analytical abilities during the learning process, requiring them to take initiative and to learn through experiments, asking questions, while being curious and creative. The role of the teacher is therefore shifted in experiential learning compared to classical lectures, as the teacher must mainly raise attention over various problems, support students and maintain an adequate environment for the learning process. The advancements of technology lead to new opportunities for systems increasing the interactivity during classes (Ubiquitous Learning). One such system is proposed by the current paper, which presents a Virtual Reality system designed to support experiential learning for computer architecture classes by creating an environment in which the user is immersed where he receives information and indications through textual cues while he assembles virtual components of a virtual computer.

231-249

Authors: eodor Stefanut, Andreea Camelia Tripon

Teaching kindergarten children is a challenging task that requires patience, imagination and very well designed didactic materials that can capture the attention of children and convey knowledge at the same time. Appropriate to the age of pupils, specific games have been developed and integrated into teaching methodologies, in order to help children in understanding and exercising different simple or more complex notions and skills. Complementing traditional teaching methods, technology is currently more present than ever in the everyday activities of children, enabling the implementation of complex learning scenarios, adaptive didactic materials, customized learning paths and optimized integration of gaming with the need of exercising different skills. Some of the challenges met in creating such tools are discussed in this article, showing as a case study that new learning methods and resources can be developed by bridging the virtual world of the mobile-based games with the real one, through the use of Augmented Reality techniques and Sphero SPRK+ robot.

105-118

Authors: Costel Marian Ionascu, Marian Cristian Mihaescu, Paul Ștefan Popescu

Creating an e-learning platform dynamically adapting to the users' learning styles and behavior is always a challenge. In this paper we describe a conceptual model for designing a dynamically adapting e-learning platform to the users' learning styles and learning behavior based on the analyze of users' events and actions. The proposed model can generate feedback for users at the individual and group level and also assist tutors to generate their feedback to the users. The paper presents the main conditions which must be fulfilled by this design, propose a way to construct learning content that facilitate the process of users' events recording and analyzing and a set of logical steps to follow in order to apply it at the level of an e-learning platform.

147-162

Authors: Irina Toma, Cristina-Elena Alexandru, Mihai Dascălu, Philippe Dessus, Ștefan Trăușan-Matu

Vocabulary acquisition is considered one of the most important aspects of a language because it defines and constraints communication. In order to overcome this, students and teachers use various techniques meant to improve the learning process and facilitate word acquisition. Using conceptual networks that establish links to prior knowledge is an approach with proven good results. The game presented in this paper, Semantic Taboo, is a serious game that helps users enlarge their conceptual network. The game has two modes, one for teachers and one for students. In the teacher module, users have the option of adding playing cards. The theme of the card (the seed) is taken as input, while the list of taboo words is selected from the list of semantically related words provided by the ReaderBench framework. The student model has the same game principle as the traditional game, but the list of taboo words and the description of the seed help the learner acquire new words. The preliminary validation consisted of 15 users who were impressed by the game concept and its educational value.

25-38

Authors: Mihai Hornariu, Alexandru Butean

Nowadays, mobile devices are the most important gadgets from our lives. We use smartphones and tablets for many activities: communication, instant messaging, emails, multimedia content sharing, social networks, e-banking procedures, etc. The fact that we are already used with their advantages makes them indispensable in our daily activities. In this paper, we present a solution, an experimental application based on the observer pattern, a method to permanently monitor the main activities (calls, messages, location) using an Android device. The interaction between the analyzed device and the observer is possible using an intermediary server that makes the connection between a hidden service and the monitoring platform. Using a tool with monitoring capabilities can be extremely useful in many cases such as industrial use for employees, the family purpose for parental control, personal security as an anti-theft solution.

61-74

Authors: Marian Cristian Mihăescu, Paul Stefan Popescu, Costel Marian Ionascu

This paper presents an extension of a previously conducted study that aims to reveal usability problems of specific functionalities. The current study also uses Tesys e-Learning platform as our study environment, therefore we made several improvements on the survey and extended the audience of the study. The main problem with the first study was the small number of students that filled the questionnaire. The current study uses a survey that was available for all the students enrolled in two long distance programs. We used the newly designed questionnaire to find how students perceive the ease of use and usefulness of a large number of features available to students. Experimental results show a good general acceptance of technology due to the general average grade of answers and detailed interpretation of results for statistical Wilcoxon test. Several limitations in perceived usability were observed in functionalities like finding chapters, finding homework or understanding question’s text when groups were divided based on reported number of hours that were spent online. Redesigning the interface for these specific functionalities and reevaluation of usability may have further a great impact in a better acceptance of Tesys e-Learning platform.