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Mark Weiser coined the term Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) describing a future in which everyday life-objects would have embedded computers providing services anytime and anywhere. This paradigm is theme recurrent in many graduate courses of Computer Science around the world. To better understand the challenge of teaching Ubiquitous Computing (Ubi-Comp), we surveyed 15 professors and 60 graduate and undergraduate students from 16 universities. According to this survey, the two most challenging Ubicomp concepts to explain in a lecture are context-awareness and middleware platforms. Results also showed professors' difficulty in finding tools to assist the practical teaching of UbiComp's concepts. Current UbiComp tools require high programming skills or they are not designed for educational purposes. Therefore, this work presents the design, development, and evaluation of LUCy (Learning Ubiquitous Computing Easily), a Virtual Learning Environment which aids UbiComp practical classes. LUCy has two main elements: a Web tool and an Android mobile app. The former provides UbiComp theory materials, videos, practices, and simulations. The latter uses smartphones features and sensors to run simulations of UbiComp concepts. We evaluated LUCy during Context-Awareness classes in UbiComp courses, at the same university, along with three distinct semesters. In different three sessions, we gathered information about LUCy's pedagogical and usability issues. Then, we performed a quasi-experiment using a pretest and posttest design methodology with twentyseven students. Results showed LUCy practices significantly improves students reasoning about Context-Aware concepts.

Development of Context-Aware and Mobile (CAM) applications requires software engineers to write complex code (e.g., adaptation mechanisms, context management) and deal with heterogeneity issues regarding devices and sensors. A promise to deal with this issue approach is the combination of MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) design principles and CAM middleware platforms. Following this approach, we present in this paper CRITiCAL, a ConfiguRation Tool for Context Aware and mobiLe applications. This tool enables visual modelling of contextual information and adaptive behaviour of a CAM application. From visual models, a code generation is performed and its result contains all methods required for communication between the application and a context management middleware. We aim at offering a simplified and visual way to define context acquisition mechanisms (e.g., get user location) and context rules in order to accelerate the development of CAM applications.