An overview of the experience of the opening two years of an institution-wide project in introducing electronic voting equipment for lectures is presented. Eight different departments and a wide range of group size (up to 300) saw some use. An important aspect of this is the organizational one of addressing the whole institution, rather than a narrower disciplinary base. The mobility of the equipment, the generality of the educational analysis, and the technical support provided contributed to this. Evaluations of each use identified (formatively) the weakest spots and the most common benefits, and also (summatively) showed that learners almost always saw this as providing a net benefit to them. Various empirical indications support the theoretical view that learning benefits depend upon putting the pedagogy (not the technology) at the focus of attention in each use. Perceived benefits tended to increase as lecturers became more experienced in exploiting the approach. The most promising pedagogical approaches appear to be Interactive Engagement (launching peer discussions), and Contingent Teaching -designing sessions not as fixed scripts but to zero in on using diagnostic questions on the points that the particular audience most needs on this occasion.

This paper reports the introduction of electronic handsets, like those used on the television show 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' into the teaching of philosophical logic. Logic lectures can provide quite a formidable challenge for many students, occasionally to the point of making them ill. Our rationale for introducing handsets was threefold: (i) to get the students thinking and talking about the subject in a public environment; (ii) to make them feel secure enough to answer questions in the lectures because the system enabled them to do this anonymously; and (iii) to build their confidence about their learning by their being able to see how they were progressing in relation to the rest of the students in the class. We have achieved all of these and more. Our experience has revealed that the use of handsets encourages a more dynamic form of student interaction in an environment -the lecture -that can, in the wrong hands, be utterly enervating, but they also provide an opportunity for the lecturer to respond to students' difficulties at the time when they really matter. In this paper, we discuss our case of rapid adoption, our grounds for judging it a success, and what that success seems to have depended on.

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School curricula contain little direct Computer Science (CS) content, and pupil surveys confirm that pupils have little idea what CS is. A range of initiatives have been introduced by universities to address this problem, and so attract more CS students. This paper presents the Computer Science Inside… project, one such initiative, the primary goals of which are to provide materials for use in secondary school classrooms, and to motivate and prepare the teachers to deliver them. The materials are principally workshops, to be conducted away from machinery and which bring out key CS concepts underpinning ubiquitous IT products such as the mobile phone or internet. All materials are available on the web, to encourage delivery widely by academics, students or teachers. Our evaluation has shown the approach to be broadly successful, and has also highlighted directions for future work.

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This paper describes the evolution of the design and implementation of a distributed run-time system that itself is designed to support the evolution of the topology and implementation of an executing, distributed system. The three different versions of the run-time architecture that have been designed and implemented are presented, together with how each architecture addresses the problems of topological and functional evolution. In addition, the reasons for the rapid evolution of the design and implementation of the architecture are also described.From the lessons learned in both evolving the design of the architecture and in trying to provide a runtime system that can support run-time evolution, this paper discusses two generally applicable observations: evolution happens all the time, and it is not possible to anticipate how systems will evolve as designs; and large, run-time systems do not follow a predictable path. In addition to this, rapid prototyping has proved to be extremely useful in the production of the three architectures; this kind of prototyping has been made much easier by designing the core set of Java abstractions in terms of interfaces; and building an architecture that allows as many decisions as possible to be made at run-time which has produced a support system that is more responsive to the user as well as the distributed environment in which it is executing. ; 33:99-120 § Teaq stands for Trees, Evolution and Queries and the word is pronounced the same as 'teak'. ¶ In Teaq, it is possible for this parent to refuse the connection, in which case, another parent has to be chosen. This should be quite rare and the number of alternative parents contacted is low, perhaps less than ten.

School curricula contain little direct Computer Science (CS) content, and pupil surveys confirm that pupils have little idea what CS is. A range of initiatives have been introduced by universities to address this problem, and so attract more CS students. This paper presents the Computer Science Inside… project, one such initiative, the primary goals of which are to provide materials for use in secondary school classrooms, and to motivate and prepare the teachers to deliver them. The materials are principally workshops, to be conducted away from machinery and which bring out key CS concepts underpinning ubiquitous IT products such as the mobile phone or internet. All materials are available on the web, to encourage delivery widely by academics, students or teachers. Our evaluation has shown the approach to be broadly successful, and has also highlighted directions for future work.