Experiences from Finland Developing a Practise system and Remarks from Usability Tests

1. Experiences from FinlandDeveloping a Practise system and Remarks from Usability Tests Timo Poranen University of Tampere Department of Computer Sciences Email: tp@cs.uta.fi http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tp Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

2. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

3. 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? Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

4. Team structure 5 BSc students (developers) 4 MSc students (project managers) 1 usability specialist (majoring in Interactive technology) Student project team Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

5. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

6. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

7. Technical details Ruby 1.8.2007 progr. lang. Ruby on Rails 2.3.2002 framework Eclipse+svn dev. env. PostgreSQL 8.2.5 database Apache 2.2.6 HTTP www-server Firefox 3.0.X Browser Tasks 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

8. 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,… Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

9. Demo http://majava.cs.uta.fi/ or some screenshots… Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

10. Screenshot Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

11. 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 Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

12. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

13. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

14. 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) Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

15. 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. Usablity test: answer selection Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

16. 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 test: problem 2 Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

17. 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… Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

18. 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. Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests

19. Questions and comments? Experiences from Finland: Developing a Practise System and remarks from usability tests