Augmenting Undergraduate Computer Science Education With Programmable Smartwatches

Abstract

Smartwatches are emerging as wrist-based computers capable of complex calculation and communication, and the computer science curriculum should reflect the challenges and opportunities that they provide in the education domain. This paper puts forth an experience report focused on efforts to incorporate smartwatches in an upper-level undergraduate mobile application development class during two academic terms. Lectures, in-class activities, homeworks, and projects were tailored toward providing rich design and implementation experiences for the students that engaged them in developing for the smartwatch and a paired mobile device. Our experiences highlighted how incorporating smartwatches into a mobile app development class adds a valuable dimension in terms of design and implementation challenges and allowed students to exercise some of the fundamental computer science topics.

Research on wearable technologies for learning: a systematic review

“…Common motivations for doing so include the proposition that students tend to express greater interest in wearables as opposed to other more typical platforms, especially in lower grades, and the fact that wearables possess many hardware limitations (e.g., processing speed, memory management) that students, especially at higher grades, should learn to handle in their computing education. For instance, Esakia et al (2015) proposed a curriculum for a mobile development course for undergraduate students centered on programming for smartwatches. A large number of work in this category engages students in the development of e-textiles.…”

A Model-Driven Cross-Platform App Development Process for Heterogeneous Device Classes

“…Only few papers provide a technical perspective on novel app-enabled devices: Singh and Buford [24] describe a cross-device team communication use case for desktop, smartphones, and Wearables, and Esakia et al [25] performed research on Pebble smartwatch and smartphone interaction in computer science courses. Some authors consider specific combinations of devices, for example Neate et al [5] who analyze second screening apps that combine smart TVs with additional content on smartphones or tablets, and Koren and Klamma [26] who propose a middleware approach to integrate data and UI of heterogeneous Web of Things devices.…”

Teaching Android Mobile Security

“…They also install a counterfeit certificate in the smartphone to bypass the verification of the remote server's authenticity. This permits them to monitor the network traffic using the Burp Suite proxy 8 . Finally, the students precisely identify the Java objects that encode the password and that are transmitted to the server when the user attempts to authenticate.…”