Update 02/05/17

Work Accomplished:
Our research paper has been accepted to the SITE conference, which will take place March 5 - March 9.

Goal:
Shorten and finalize the proceedings file, along with create the presentation for the conference. I will also be making other plans in preparation for the conference.

Outcome:
By working on this paper, I've learned all the protocol involved in writing and submitting a research paper.

--Eugene

Update 1/29/17

Work accomplished:
We have completed a basic pattern generation script along with a basic patten entry method in the application. Further development in these two components will increase usability in the survey.  The client networking code has been rewritten using C++, which has eliminated the app-crashing bug on the Android platform.

Goal:
One of the major goals we have for the next few weeks is to complete all the required documentation for our IRB proposal. We expect the approval process to take 3-4 weeks, so it is crucial that we complete the proposal material as soon as possible. We will also continue working on the client-side and server-side components in an effort to finalize our system before the user study. The account creation aspect of our system will need to be implemented so that new users can log in to the system.

Outcome:
We will have permission from the Institutional Review Board to collect data from testing our application in classrooms.

Update 1/23/17

We have completed the collaborative research paper and we have submitted the paper to the organization. We have managed to get QR functionality in the app by using the quirc QR decoder library. We have yet to get the in-app camera working. In the coming weeks we will continue developing the in-app pattern submission system, along with server-side pattern generation.

--Eugene

Update 1/15/17

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of focus on the collaborative research paper that we will be submitting to the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education's SITE conference. We are on schedule to complete the full paper that details the overall system of our project, along with some information regarding the evaluation plan for our experiment. We have been rewriting some of the code used for communication between the network and server since there were some bugs created by the JavaScript code. We will also be modifying the application's user interface to better resemble what the application should look like in its completed state.

--Eugene

Update 11/20/16

In this week's meeting we continued discussing conferences that we are interested in attending. We decided that we would take ACMSE 2017 into serious consideration.

Regarding progress on the project, the server can now interpret timestamp information transmitted from the app component. Along with sending timestamp information, we also have the capability to send basic device information to the server. We have encountered a bug in the app that causes it to crash when launching on a mobile device. We were able to test the information transmission by using the desktop app, however, we will need to look into this bug.

--Eugene

Update 11/13/16

In this week's meeting we discussed what other information should be sent in addition to the evidence submitted by the student. We decided that there should be various timestamps sent between the server and the device. Using these timestamps for our user study will allow us to collect important efficiency-related data. Along with these timestamps, we also thought about sending device information that could be used to determine a user's identity as a means of bypassing the log-in process every time.

We also discussed various conferences that we are interested in attending, including some international ones, such as: GCCCE (China), LTLE (Japan), IEEE ICALT (Romania), and AACE ED-Media (Washington, D.C.). We will hopefully come to a decision in next week's meeting.

--Eugene

Update 11/06/16

In this week's meeting we displayed the version of our app that is capable of communicating with the server. There is still some work to do on the user interface to make it more dynamic across devices with different screen sizes. The current state of the app is shown below on an Android device:

                               Initial log in screen                      
    

Error upon bad authentication attempt 

 

 Screen where attendance evidence will be submitted

 

   Evidence success screen

There are still many evidence methods that have yet to be implemented. In the user study we will have the ability to disable certain methods so that we are able to choose which ones will be tested at one time. We have given some thought to a system where students are required to use a certain number of evidence methods simultaneously in order for their attendance to be considered valid. Requiring students to submit 2-3 different types of evidence can help in reducing fraud.

In this next week we will continue developing the server-side component to ensure that information is being sent successfully. We also have to determine what other information can be sent to the server, i.e., WiFi information and device information. This type of information will be useful in the user study.


--Eugene