Gamification is the use of game mechanics such as rewarding points and achievement badges to engage target audience and encourage desired behaviors. Gamification has gained a great surge of interest in recent years as an effective approach to engage existing users and attract new users to web sites. In this paper, the use of gamification in engaging Computer Science students in an online social network based collaborative learning environment, called PeerSpace, is discussed. PeerSpace integrates a suite of Web 2.0 tools that promote student interactions on course-related topics as well as purely social matters. The design and implementation details of various gamification schemes are presented. An assessment of the effectiveness of the schemes is discussed

Current service architecture description language and composition approaches consider simplistic method invocation. They pay less attention to the formal semantics and verification of service composition in the design, and less support property specifications and architecture validation. This paper presents an executable web service architecture model, Service-Oriented Software Architecture Model (SO-SAM), which is an extension of SAM (Software Architecture Model [16]) to the web service applications, and verification of web system properties in the design. SO-SAM describes each web service in terms of component and service composition in terms of connector separately. Furthermore, we validate SO-SAM model to prove that it facilitates the verification and monitoring of web services integration through translation to the Maude programming langauge, a high level language and high performance executable specification with the componentized and object-oriented design, as well as using model checking technique in the system design level. Finally, a case study of the validation of the model is demonstrated.

Web services provide a language-neutral, loosely-coupled, and platform independent way for linking applications within organizations or enterprises across the Internet. Web services communicate with each other via XML format messages. This paper presents a web service architecture model, Service-Oriented Software Architecture Model (SO-SAM), which is an extension of SAM (Software Architecture Model [16]) to the web service applications, as well as a validation of the model and a case study. SO-SAM is an executable architectural model incorporating Predicate Transition Nets with the style and understandability of component-based concepts. SO-SAM describes each web service in terms of component and service composition in terms of connector separately. We believe that SO-SAM facilitates the verification and monitoring of web services integration since SO-SAM fits the distributed nature of modern composite web services. In order to validate the model against system properties, we rewrite the SO-SAM into the XML format, and validate SO-SAM using a SAM support tool, SAM parser. Finally, a case study of the validation of the model is demonstrated.

The aim of PeerSpace is to promote peer support and peer learning in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses by providing the students with online collaborative tools for convenient synchronous and asynchronous interactions on course related topics and social matters. This paper presents the development of various social and learning components in PeerSpace that are unique in promoting collaborative learning. Analysis of preliminary results is presented.

Abstract-Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are pervasive in our daily life from mobile phones to auto driving cars. CPSs are inherently complex due to their sophisticated behaviors and thus difficult to build. In this paper, we propose a framework to develop CPSs based on a model driven approach with quality assurance throughout the development process. An agent-oriented approach is used to model individual physical and computation processes using high level Petri nets, and an aspect-oriented approach is used to integrate individual models. The Petri net models are systematically mapped to classes and threads in Java, which are enhanced and extended with domain specific functionalities. Complementary quality assurance techniques are applied throughout system development and deployment, including simulation and model checking of design models, model checking of Java code, and run-time verification of Java executable. We demonstrate our framework using a car parking system.