Dr. Scott Dick - University Of Alberta
October 17, 2008
From time to time we cover "cool" Bluetooth-related projects here and we interview the people involved.
This is a little different. Dr. Scott Dick is a Faculty Member and Lecturer at the University of Alberta. He specializes in computational intelligence (fuzzy logic, neural networks), machine learning and data mining, with applications in software reliability and livestock disease monitoring. He's been lecturing in Software Engineering since since 2003; he introduced mobile-computing platforms in 2004.
He's using Impronto in his courses. You may be aware that we offer our tools for free to Universities and have done for several years now.
I asked him "what's he doing with Impronto - and what's the context". I thought it might be useful to share that with you. Here's what he wrote:
I am a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, teaching in the Software Option of the Computer Engineering program. I am using the Impronto development kit in a "capstone" software engineering design course, for senior students in the last semester of their degree programs. The purpose of a capstone design course is to provide students with a hands-on opportunity to design a relatively large product in a group setting, thus allowing them to demonstrate how they can apply all the knowledge and skills they have acquired in the course of their education. The outcome of this course is the completion of a reasonably "large" system -- one that could not possibly have been built by a single student in the time available. Capstone courses are often regarded by employers as a revealing test of the students' ability to work in a team and complete a complex project.
Some years ago, I realized that basing all of the capstone projects on desktop platforms was a disservice to the students. Modern software development was increasingly oriented towards mobile platforms and wireless networks, and indeed most of the really creative and interesting products were now being targeted at mobile devices rather than desk-bound PCs. There is also a trend towards multi-platform computing, where functionality in a system is partitioned between high-powered desktops and less-powerful mobile devices.
I thus began looking for technologies and development platforms that would allow the students to create desktop systems, mobile systems, or heterogeneous systems for their capstone projects. We selected Impronto as part of the mobile-computing infrastructure because it is an easy-to-use JSR82 implementation (the students have already had several courses with programming assignments in Java) that is easy to install and maintain on Linux systems. We use Bluetooth networks because of their limited range (10 meters); switching between base stations is an important part of true wireless networks, but an 802.11 network's range (100 meters) would cover the entire building with a single access point. We have Bluetooth radio antennas for the desktops (USB dongles), and Bluetooth-equipped PDAs (with development kits) as the remainder of the infrastructure for the course. We are also currently acquiring a set of Tablet PCs, which are another point in the spectrum of mobile devices.
Students generally have a great deal of freedom in selecting the projects they will work on; I believe (and experience confirms) that one of the important determinants of success in a capstone project is for the students to choose projects that they feel passionate about. I do not, for instance, require that any of the projects incorporate mobile computing (although there is a set of three laboratory exercises to familiarize the students with the mobile computing infrastructure). In the past four years, just under half of the student groups have elected to tackle mobile-computing projects
------------------------------------
So there you go. We're aware of quite a few other Universities and Research Labs using Impronto in different ways. If you're interested in sharing your work and your experiences, drop us a line.