It is essential for educators to identify the student’s reading ability when learning debugging strategies. Forty-five senior high school students (average 17.6 years old, SD=0.35) participated in this study. The participants were divided into three groups to examine the effect of three teaching materials including 1) normal reasoning, 2) a debugging process model, and 3) a debugging process model and three debugging strategies, namely, forward strategy, backward strategy, and CLOCK-based strategy. While the participants debugging a digital circuit question, the eye tracker recorded the eye movement data for analysis. The results indicated that participants receiving a debugging process model and three debugging strategies improved their debugging skills significantly by: 1) increased percentage of the participants finding bugs correctly, 2) increased percentage of the participants using debugging strategies correctly, and 3) reduced time spent on debugging in average. The findings may help educators and researchers understand the benefit of debugging strategies on digital circuits to design better teaching materials, methods, and learning strategies.

In the evaluation of Web 2.0 language learning websites, various aspects to be evaluated are often distinguished, such as the visual design, the pedagogical content, and the involvement of multiple technologies (Liu et al., 2011). In order to make the evaluative judgments, the methods commonly used include expert judgment by inspection of the website, or user judgment obtained from surveys of learner attitude (Chwo, 2013). This study aims to add to this range of evaluation methods by exploiting a relatively new research tool, eyetracking (Reichle et. al, 2013), to help establish what options are in fact better. We took as an example the instructions presented on screen for various tasks and, based on the types given in the Livemocha website (Chwo et al., 2012), devised webpages allowing us to measure how four eye movement related effects differ with nine binary webpage choices ranging from visual design (e.g. dark or light background) to pedagogical content (e.g. presence or absence of a picture). Six Taiwanese learners of English major student participated. Results show that the titles, background colors and highlighted prints will increase our EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners’ fixation frequency and the focal browsing time. However, the opposite result goes to the illustration relevant to the reading text. Moreover, the increasing number of the word count in the text will shorten the fixation frequency and focal browsing time. Lastly, the location of the illustration will not affect the browsing behaviors. The interpretation and the potential factors contributed to the findings will be discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether there are differences in the reading process between high-grade and low-grade students by tasking them to find a bug in a digital logic circuit. Based on the pre-test scores, 155 high school students were divided into a high-grade group and a low-grade group. To examine their reading process, both groups were asked to find a bug in a digital circuit, and an infrared eye tracker recorded their eye movement. Correlation coefficient was used to analyze the saccadic data. The findings show 1) the integrative saccades from signal names of the timing diagram to other Regions of Interest (ROI) has the lowest correlation coefficient (0.3345); 2) there is a larger difference in the integrative saccades between the high and low-grade groups from signal names of timing diagram to timing diagram ROIs of RESET, CLOCK, INPUT and OUTPUT. These findings show that the low-grade group had some difficulties in reading comprehension when reading timing diagrams of RESET and OUTPUT, but fewer difficulties when reading CLOCK and INPUT. In addition, difficulties in reading comprehension also appeared when calculating OUTPUT. This paper contributes to the field of learning science by providing evidence of the saccade difference between digital circuit readers with and without difficulties in reading comprehension.

Questionnaire is a conventional approach for fashion designers and educators to survey consumers’ general preferences of products’ appearances; however the precision of survey results remains questionable. The authors proposed an alternative in this pilot study in which five eye trackers were used to record 10 female participants’ eye movement data of gazing at 20 randomly displayed handbag pictures. Six types of Regions of Interest (ROI) of handbags were assigned to understand which regions were more attractive to the participants. The times and duration of fixations showed the degree of ROIs’ attractiveness to the participants. The findings provide persuasive eye-movement evidence of predicting potential female consumers’ gazing behaviors. Textbook editors of fashion design can also add eye-tracking approach to future books. And eye-tracking technology can also help fashion design educators to enhance teaching and students’ learning. Moreover gazing behavior can be broadly considered a form of reading, and the findings of this study further extend the existing knowledge of human reading process.

The trilateral noise filter is capable of reducing both Gaussian and impulse image noise. The filter combines domain filter, range filter, and rank-ordered absolute differences (ROAD) measurement into an integrated weighting function. The main issue of applying such a powerful noise filter on real-time imaging systems is that its time complexity is extremely high. A possible way to remedying the problem is designing a dedicated hardware accelerator. In this paper, we propose a new pipelined architecture design for trilateral noise filtering. By using a bitwise operation for ROAD calculation and piecewise linear approximation for exponential function evaluation, the performance of these two time consuming operations are improved dramatically. The proposed architecture has been verified on a Xilinx FPGA board, and the system clock of this design can achieve 96.5 MHz which can process 4 MPixels/second.

Two pumping theorems are derived for a network N of CFSMs (communicating finite state machines). Each pumping theorem describes a set of conditions under which a feasible event sequence of N can be pumped to produce an infinite set of feasible event sequences of N. The authors show that if a feasible event sequence E satisfying the conditions in one pumping theorem does not result in a deadlock or unspecified reception, neither does any event sequence derived by pumping E. Based on these results, they develop a pumping-based approach for detecting deadlocks and unspecified receptions in a network of CFSMs. The experimental results of applying this new approach to validate several communication protocols are shown.>