Stefaan Ternier

Feature Requests

2013-02-26T19:53:47Z

Since we published ARLearn in Google Play, we recorded almost 100 installs and more then 150 games have been created so far. Some users have requested new features which makes us of course very happy. In order to facilitate this, we started gathering these issues at one place

The ARLearn Google Code project is the place where we manage our code. Here, users can request new features or (even better) star existing issues. By starring an issue you underline its importance and indicate that you need this functionality as well. We hope that offering his voting function to the community will give us more insight in your needs.

Leren in dialoog met de omgeving

2012-11-19T20:18:08Z

In het project Het Leren van de Toekomst gaan Pabo-studenten aan de slag met ARLearn. Rianne Tolsma en Ellen Domke van Iselinge Hogeschool leggen uit hoe ze ARLearn zullen gebruiken.

Lees meer hierover op http://innovatie.kennisnet.nl/leren-in-dialoog-met-de-omgeving/

ARLearn @ Bogerman

2012-08-29T21:18:38Z

Begin dit jaar heeft Thies de Jong -in het kader van z'n scriptie onderzoek- ARLearn ingezet om wiskunde te doceren op zijn school. Concreet heeft hij onderzocht welke motivatie verschillen er zijn bij een spel-gebaseerde versus een niet spel-gebaseerde aanpak met ARLearn.

Op de website van Bogerman - de school waar Thies werkzaam is - kun je meer lezen over hun ervaring met onze tool:

http://www.bogerman.nl/2012/07/nieuw-nummer-oudercontactblad-de-boog/ (Op pagina 5 vind je het ARLearn artikel)

Discharge Letters and NFC

2012-08-28T09:45:36Z

A couple of weeks ago, I received two brand new HTC devices with Near Field Communication (NFC) support. NFC enabled Android phones can read passive RFID tags, but can also use this short-range wireless technology to exchange (small) messages (Android Beam). NFC in that sense competes with bluetooth. Compared to bluetooth, NFC

requires the devices to be really close (<4cm)
does not require the devices to pair before communicating.

Although the latter features comes in handy from usuability point of view, it has already been shown that this can help hackers to get access to your phone.

Last week, Hendrik Drachsler, Leonardo Lezcano and myself started brainstorming on how we could use Android Beam to facilitate the handover of medical discharge letters between doctors and patients. Sharing these letters with patients and providing extra services around gives patients more insight on their health. Furthermore the app for patients can be extended with extra functionality to give them for instance more information about e.g. their mediciation. If you want to know more about this handover problem, read further at http://www.handover.ou.nl/.

In this blogpost, I'll show you a (very) early prototype that demonstrates how a doctor can pass a discharge letter to a patient's mobile device via Near Field Communication.

The screenshot shows the mobile device from the perspective of a General Practioner. Screen 2, shows the discharge letters, relevant to a patient. Screen 3 visualizes data available on the discharge letter (e.g. "Problems and Diagnosis", "Medication", etc.)

The following video now illustrates how I can pass this information via android beam to another device.

Note that this is an early prototype and the wireframe for both General Practioner and Patient will be subjected to change. However this video illustrates how NFC technology can be used within the medical domain.

ARLearn authoring tool

2012-06-19T07:04:51Z

ARLearn is a toolkit for mobile field trips and (serious) games. The ANDROID app is already for some weeks available via Google Play. It has been successfully piloted with cultural science students in Florence and an ARLearn security simulation has been organised with employees of UNHCR.

Till now ARLearn content creation was cumbersome. Apart from manually crafting JSON encoded game files, there was no convenient way to create an ARLearn game. Today we're releasing a functional authoring tool for ARLearn. Admitted, the tool is not perfect yet but it greatly speeds up the time necessary to create a game. Furthermore, this tool supports monitoring the progress of the different users. By creating a game run, games can be played with real users.

The following video shows how to get started with the ARLearn authoring tool.

Try this yourself at http://streetlearn.appspot.com/Authoring.html and download the ARLearn android app. This release of the authoring tool features

Four kinds of media objects: narrative objects, multiple choice questions, videos and audio objects.
Map based (re)positioning of media items
A powerful notification framework. Modifications to runs or games are made available real time to the android app.
Support for downloading games and runs to your computer, so that they can be reused.

Other features that are supported by ARLearn, but have not yet made it to the authoring tool include

Dependencies. Through dependencies media objects are linked. For instance, feedback objects can be bound to actions such as giving an answer.
Radius triggers to make media visible only when the user is near to an object.
Manual triggers that enable the operator to make items appear or disappear.
Other media objects like pickup items or zones where items can be dropped.

Notification systems: XMPP versus the Google Channel API

2012-05-22T08:03:45Z

Google App Engine (GAE), a cloud based solution for hosting servlets, features a whole range of APIs with two candidates for building a notification system:

the Google channel API
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)

GAE implements a HTTP servlet container that can either fuel REST-based web services or plain HTML applications. In this internet-based communication model, the client normally initiates communication and pulls information from the server. A vast amount of mobile applications however requires push technology where the request is initiated by the server, i.e. GAE.

In ARLearn for instance, both the smartphone app and the Google StreetView application build on on push technology to notify the user when new content is available or when the (team) score has been altered.

XMPP and the channel API enable such push notifyications, but both have pros and cons. XMPP is the successor of the jabber protocol for exchanging chat messages. This protocol supports communicating plain chat messages and structured xml messages which makes the protocol a candidate for notifications. Originally, the ARLearn smartphone app implemented an XMPP client, listening for messages from the account that is associated with the GAE application. There are however many disadvantages to this approach:

In order to communicate with the server, one needs a Google account. In the case of ARLearn, the user's Google account is used to communicate through the google talk server with the GAE XMPP account. This means that the GAE account becomes visible in your list of Google talk friends, which is a bit artificial.
Google talk is a service hosted on talk.google.com on port 5222 or port 443. ARLearn experience has shown that a connection with talk.google.com on 5222 is blocked on many public or corporate networks.
For StreetLearn - a JavaScript Google StreetView mashup - the situation is even worse, as the browser blocks communication to domains different from the domain hosting the JavaScript code.

The Google channel API implements long polling (aka 'Comet programming'). With this technique, the browser sends a request to the server that does live beyond the 30 seconds limit. The server holds this request and once information is available, a response is sent to the client. As the channel API was designed for web applications and targets JavaScript clients only, it overcomes many of the limitations of XMPP:

No cross domain issues
No Google accounts necessary and thus no side effects like messing up your contact list. As this API features concepts like channels, client identifiers and tokens to access channels, it enables the dynamic creation of communication channels.

There is one big disadvantage to the channel API: it only features a JavaScript client. As a result, native smartphone apps built in Java or Objective C cannot profit from this technology. For Java, an elegant short solution (4 java classes of core code) has been implemented by Tom Parker that reverse engineers this JavaScript API. This makes the channel API usable in java-based desktop applications like native android.

ARLearn published on Google Play

2012-04-18T07:45:44Z

Today, I published ARLearn on Google Play, formerly known as the Google Market. There are still some glitches in the tool, but we decided to give this a try and start collecting feedback. So, this is a warm invitation to send us your ideas or feature request.

For those that are new to this topic: ARLearn is a toolkit that combines field-trips, augmented reality and serious games. With the toolkit one can create “games” (e.g. a simple field-trips) and “runs”. A game is a blueprint and captures the design of your mobile activities. A game can be materialized into many runs. Within a run, a fixed set of users can act and even compete. Also, actions performed by users, response that were given, etc are all collected within a run.

The tool that we released today is fully functional. However, so far we have not released the authoring tool yet. So if you want to be on the bleeding edge, go ahead and download. Drop us a note and we will help you to get your first run installed. If you rather see yourself as an early adopter, we advise you to wait for some more days. We are now working hard now on finishing the beta version of the authoring tool for ARLearn. With this tool it will become possible to create your own field trips, play them with students and collect results.