Electrical grid planning aims at optimizing the grid through the control of the performance and placement of electrical assets in order to minimize failures or vulnerabilities. With this purpose, grid planners carry out an initial stage of data exploration using a large volume of incident and equipment data collected over extensive time periods. In current practice these tasks are performed manually, which makes it very difficult to recognize patterns and gain insights into the data. In this paper, we propose a parallel multivariate visualization technique as a suitable approach for improving the existing practice. Based on the usage of an interactive visualization tool called BarExam, we demonstrate the feasibility of this visualization technique for displaying the dataset and present example insights that this visualization technique can provide to grid planners.

The application of computer games for learning is a field of growing interest in the education community. Games have proved to be a useful resource to teach concepts, expand perceptions, or develop skills. Typically, young children make use of recognition pattern games. This kind of games helps children to improve their knowledge and recognition skills. However, these games require someone to control the process of the game and provide feedback to the child. This paper presents a game environment based on applying the principles of natural interfaces to the development of education computer games. After realizing the proof-of-concept, we could observe that this environment allows children to interact with the games in an instinctive way seamlessly.

The development of a learning system based on integrating a number of learning services needs both a technological platform to support the system as well as a methodology that manages the development process. Such technological platform is provided by the Service Oriented Learning Architecture (SOLA) that defines an architecture style guiding several aspects of deploying units of learning that are packaged as services. The purpose of this paper is to review the SOLA concept and present a specific methodology, based on analysing instructional domains, to complement the SOLA approach. The method here proposed addresses the identification and classification of learning services to facilitate the integration of such services.

Instructional software can be defined as any computer program used for instruction. As a means to optimise the development process of instructional software, different authors have defined a range of methods based on Software Engineering. However, the use of a method does not guarantee the validity and quality of the product developed; hence, a series of Software Process Improvement (SPI) approaches aimed to improve and guarantee the development process that have arisen. The purpose of this paper is to review the aforementioned approaches and to apply them to the analysis phase of the instructional software development process. The analysis phase aims to define the conditions and needs of the project in order to solve uncertainties in early stages of the process.

The analysis phase constitutes an essential step in the development of information systems. Nevertheless, learning materials design activities currently have reduced the analysis phase to a narrative description of particular learning problems. The intention of this paper is to highlight the relevance of the analysis phase within the learning material development process. To this end, we introduce the concept of "Learning Analysis" as the set of mechanisms that enable us to analyze the design space based on a wellknown domain model.