Both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action are important, especially in creative design work. Although school curricula teach the technical side of design, they do not teach the psychological side, represented by the reflection process. The goal of this research is to support learners to understand experts’ reflection processes in relation to design. This paper describes experts’ reflection-in-/-on-action processes in design, and how learners observe this from video data on the design process, and on eye-tracking of an expert designer. The findings are helpful for designing environments that support students to learn about experts’ reflection processes.

The information technology industry in Japan has required universities to provide project management education. In Tokyo University of Technology, role-play training has been carried out as part of project management education. The role-play scenarios necessary to run role-play exercises have been created in accordance with the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model. This paper describes a method for evaluating project management competency that learners gain through role-play training conducted using the scenarios. Competency in project management is assessed from a learner's behavior characteristics in taking an appropriate action when needed. We first examined the quality of the role-play scenarios by using a design checklist based on Goal-Based Scenarios (GBS). In addition, we analyzed the behavior of each learner during a role-play exercise by using rubrics based on how the user behaved. A high correlation was found between the acquired skill with which learners generally played the role assigned to them in role-play training and the level of quality of the role-play scenario. Based on the analysis results, we will propose a method for helping learners to be able to take effective action by providing appropriate advice from a software agent and feedback from a teacher, along with use of the GBS checklist.

This paper describes an educational scheme involving “learning by producing in interesting software education” and “learning by experiencing in practical software education”. Outcomes are presented in the form of useful research activities and the educational scheme is discussed within the framework of the Tangible Software Engineering Education Project. The outcomes developed in the Project are introduced and their educational effectiveness is discussed.

This paper describes an on-line group work training environment which integrates a system implementing role-play training for project management education, the development of role-play scenarios, and the monitoring and analysis of the behavior track records of each learner while a role-play is in progress. The integrated environment can motivate a student to study project management and provide an effective means of education. In order to improve the students' skill level through role-play training, time consuming work is required for a faculty staff to carefully develop and review each role-play scenario. The proposed environment could shorten the debug time by an average of 63%, and can monitor and analyze students' learning attitudes as the role-play takes place.

A role-play training system for enhancing the efficiency of education in project management is proposed and its effectiveness evaluated. The system is essentially a Web application that runs an interactive virtual project, in which each learner assumes the role of one of its stakeholders. It is a non-intelligent system driven by a scenario that defines the scope of the virtual project, gives information about the stakeholders, and issues a series of directions to the participants. An institution can improve the quality of education by providing individualized guidance to learners based on an analysis of their learning behavior recorded in their logs.

Jun is a large open-source graphics and multimedia library. It is object-oriented and supports 3D geometry, topography and multimedia. This paper reviews the development of the Jun library from five perspectives: open-source, software evolution processes, development styles, technological support, and development data. It concludes with lessons learned from the perspective of a for-profit company providing open-source object-oriented software to the community.

The goal of this research is to study the role and effects of the use of animated information visualization in the early stages of exploratory data analysis tasks. Despite the existence of a large body of research on information visualization, there is little known regarding how and when one should use and how to interact with animated visualization to help explore data. By animated visualization, we mean a type of information visualization technique that produces autonomous motions of representations. This research explored the issue from two aspects: what cognitive effects animated information visualization has, and what interactions people have with animated visualization when exploring data. We conducted two user studies to investigate each aspect, and identified research challenges for designing an interactive animated information visualization environment that supports the early stages of exploratory data analysis. These findings help us further study how to extend the notions developed in spatial visualization to temporal visualization - e.g. what focus+context means when applied to the time dimension in animated visualization.