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Simen Fossnes

Simen Fossnes
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Software Engineering
Faculty of Engineering and Science
Wednesday 21 June 2017

DynQ (Dynamic Questing Application)

DynQ (Dynamic Questing Application), as part of the PhD project “Human-centred Design for Mobile Technology in Higher Education” aims for bringing state of the art technology into real higher education.

DynQ (Dynamic Questing App), as part of the PhD project “Human-centred Design for Mobile Technology in Higher Education” aims for bringing state of the art technology into real higher education, enabling the teachers to enhance their teaching through possibilities provided by cutting edge technology usage. The central concept surrounds task design, distribution and feedback. Designing for teachers means supporting and enhancing their individual teaching approach, not to replace them. So the big question in this project is “what do teachers need?”.

In a classroom, you can both interact with, support and answer questions your students directly. Imagine a scenario where your students are kilometres apart, working on different tasks, all requiring guidance and support. Utilizing cutting edge contextualized mobile technology can help solve these major challenges faced in such learning scenarios, as well as open up for serendipitous possibilities.

One of those occasions where learning highly depends on tasks is outdoor education: skiing and snowboarding, offered by UiA. Teachers focus on experiential learning, action and reflection when training students to ski or to snowboard.

Animasjon Dynq

Throughout the project, a lot of material has been covered on application development using the android operating system by building for both wearable and mobile devices. Ubiquitous computing is gaining more relevance as wearable technology becomes increasingly more powerful and popular. The project utilized Firebase, a backend-as-a-service solution provided by Google, for handling the persistence and real time synchronization of data as well as file storage across devices.

Main challenges in this project included:

  • communication and data exchange between smartphone and android wear device
  • data and file persistency
  • communication between firebase server and client application

It was interesting being a part of this ongoing research following the Human-centred Design process [ISO 9241 - 210], meaning that frequent adaptation and updating according to frequent user feedback and evaluation was required. A MVP(Minimum Viable Product) was rapidly prototyped using new technologies such as firebase, enabling the testing of some of the new concepts covered more in depth in “Human-centred Design for Mobile Technology in Higher Education”. You can read more about the concepts covered in this brief blog post in the publications listed here or here.