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 Peter
Brusilovsky and Vladimir Zadorozhny have been awarded
a grant by the National Science Foundation to create
a “Personalized Exploratorium for Database Courses.” Announced
on January 10, 2007, this $143,345 grant will support
the development of an innovative tool to encourage students
to develop practical SQL skills through the use of interactive,
automatically-evaluated exercises and examples. Brusilovsky
and Zadorozhny will build upon a previous project (also
NSF-supported) that used interactive exercises for C
language programming: the current project will
explore the value of interactive exercises in the context
of Database courses.
Brusilovsky and Zadorozhny will adapt an existing technology
for automatic evaluation of SQL exercises (SQL-Tutor)
developed by Dr. Antonija Mitrovic at the University
of Canterbury, New Zealand while also developing a complementary
script-based evaluation technology. This two-year
project will result in a set of interactive
SQL examples for the original SQL-Tutor technology and
enhancing it with personalized guidance that is known
to increase student engagement and success rate.
Associate Professor Brusilovsky joined the faculty at the
School of Information Sciences in 2000, teaching in the
programming, interactive system design, and information
storage and retrieval areas. His research interests
include adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web; user modeling
and personalization; navigation support in electronic environments;
intelligent tutoring systems and shells; Web-based education;
and human-computer interaction. Brusilovsky won the
prestigious National Science Foundation’s Career
Award in 2005 which is funding his research on personalized
information access. Zadorozhny, Assistant Professor, has
been a member of the SIS faculty since 2001 and teaches
a variety of courses in the Database and Web Systems Track
of Study. His research interests cover networked
information systems, wireless and sensor data management,
and scalable architectures. Most recently, Zadorozhny
was the recipient of a grant from the Norwegian Research
Council to investigate designing efficient security and
privacy solutions for applications in wireless networks
(with Prashant Krishnamurthy). |
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