experiences from finland developing a practise system and remarks from usability tests

04/20/23 Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

Beaver Workshop 2009

Experiences from FinlandDeveloping a Practise system and Remarks from Usability

Tests

Timo Poranen

University of Tampere

Department of Computer Sciences

Email: [email protected]

http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tp



Finland: current beaver status

• At them moment, there is no own beaver contest in Finland.– Only Datastar-contest to select students to be trained for BOI and

IOI.

• Hard to find resources (people, time, funding).– Reason: informatics is not a school subject.

• We implemented a Beaver practise system during academic year 2008-2009 at the University of Tampere.

• The system will be used in some schools and to sell the idea for companies and ministry of education.



Future goals

• To involve government, more university people, teachers and companies.

• Write to Finnish language journals on the Beaver contest: – Finnish Mathematics teacher’s association’s newsletter– Pedagogical newsletters– University reports– To write a similar booklet as Germany did for teachers.

• To get some schools to use the practise system during their (mathematics?) lessons.

• Own contest 2010 or 2011?



Student project team

• Team structure– 5 BSc students

(developers)– 4 MSc students

(project managers)– 1 usability

specialist (majoring in Interactive technology)



Overview of the project

•The project implemented a practise system for the Beaver contest.•The system contains tasks from 2007 and 2008 contests in Finnish and in English.•The system is available for everyone: http://majava.cs.uta.fi•The system supports only practising, not real contests.



Project experiences

• Translation of tasks is very hard part– Fluent task translation was difficult for the students – Preferably teachers from schools (not only overloaded university staff!)

are needed for translations.• From lecturer’s point of view: Almost everything went normally/fine

(requirements elicitation, software design, programming, technical documentation, testing, usability testing, reporting, management,…).

• Most of the team members worked at the same time they study -> so the project would have done more if the student would have had more time to concentrate on the course…

• Public report from the project will be published as a technical report in dept’s electronic publication series.



Technical details Ruby 1.8.2007 progr. lang.Ruby on Rails 2.3.2002 frameworkEclipse+svn dev. env.PostgreSQL 8.2.5 databaseApache 2.2.6 HTTP www-serverFirefox 3.0.X BrowserTasks HTML-code•Localisable to other languages (Finnish, English)•Code is free (GPL) and available for eveyone•No support for interactive tasks or contests.•Graphics/pictures: from the Lithuania or from earliers tasks or drawn by the project group.



Practise system: how it works?

Student point of view:• Students select their age-group and question year• Answer questions (no time limit)• After answering, the system gives feedback and tells the

correct answers.• It is possible to go back to aswer questions as many times as

you like.

Administrator point of view• Administrator has a www-UI for adding / editing / deleting

tasks / languages / years / age-categories…• Taks/years/categories can be disabled/enabled without

deleting them.• Usage logs, picture upload,…



Demo

http://majava.cs.uta.fi/

or

some screenshots…



Screenshot



Usability test

• Standard usability test– 16 small test cases– Moderator– Test person thinks aloud– Interview – Video recording– Only 2 participants– Findings classified to

categories: Fatal, medium, low, cosmetic, technical, comment.

• Goal is to detect usability problems.

• Picture taken from an article: Hakola, Hautamäki, Parviainen, Peltomäki, Poranen, Käytettävyys ja Oppiminen, PedaForum

2006/2, pages 43-46.



Usability test: participants

• Participant 1– Boy, 10 years (< Benjamin).– Beginner/novice.– Uses internet about once in a week, mainly for playing and

for other free-time activities.• Participant 2

– Boy, 11 years (Benjamin).

– Uses computers easily, knows basic programs.– Uses daily Internet for communication with the friends.



Usability test: Positive results

• System is nice and mainly easy to use.• Look-and-feel is good.• It is easy to move between questions.• For the more advanced participant it was

easy (instinctive) to select / unselect choices.

• The system got grade 3.5/5.



Usability test: negative results

• From the tests we recognised 7 usability problems.• Main problems

– Selecting / submitting / unselecting an answer.– English language terms in some questions (”FW” or

”forward” should be in Finnish, ”eteenpäin”)).– Location and recognisability of some navigation

buttons (especially going back to the main page and links to external www-pages)

– Technical problems (IE vs Mozilla browser)



Usablity test: answer selection

• Problem 1: User doesn’t understand selection and submission of an answer.

• Only with the unexperienced user.

• Fixing: better guidelines and images how to answer.

• In some questions ”answer”-button goes too down. (depends on the screen size or browser window).

• After answering the ”clear” button comes visible.



Usability test: problem 2

• Problem 2: On the feedback-page link to front page is only in the crumb path.

• Under link ”Palaa vastaamaan” (=”Go back to answer”) – we added links to the front page and to the year-selection.



Usability problems…

• User doesn’t understand some terms (especially foreign language words)

• Everything should be in the user’s own language.

• Pay attention to the task translation.



Usability problems: more…

• Some buttons were not recognised as buttons.

• External links should open to a new window or a new tab.

• Compatibility problems with IE.• More information (feedback) and links to

the feedback page.



Questions and comments?

experiences from finland developing a practise system and remarks from usability tests

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