Using a single subject research design, the effects of computer based brain training were examined to determine if computational fluency increased after completing the brain training activities. The study took place in a large public high school. Participants were students with learning disabilities who were also below level in mathematics. During the baseline phase, all participants completed a timed math probe daily for 1 week. Because the timed math probes were timed, the researcher was looking for an average gain for each student. During week two students completed the brain age activities daily, prior to completing the math probe. Average gains for each student continued to be recorded. During week three the Brain Age activities were withdrawn and students continued to complete the timed math probes. During week four, the Brain Age activities were reinstated and data collection continued as the students completed the timed math probes. The data was analyzed visually, and the split middle technique was applied to determine a predicted slope of the data, followed by a binomial test to determine if there was a significant difference from baseline to intervention. The results of the current research have demonstrated that while computerized brain training may be effective for some students, the results are varied. While significant gains in computational speed and accuracy were noted for all participants during at least two of the phases, significant differences were only observed for one participant across all four phases.

Tying web services together to build large, distributed, collaborative applications has gathered noticeable momentum and a lot of research is being put in it. Along with composition of the web services, coordination is one key aspect that has been considered keenly. Many frameworks, languages and protocols have been proposed for web service composition and coordination. With the advancement in wireless technology and rapid deployment of mobile services, collaborative application development for small devices using such composed web services finds a new research area. Much less work has been done in the area of web service coordination for mobile environment. In this thesis, we propose a new distributed approach in service composition and coordination and show that our approach works well in an environment containing mobile heterogeneous devices. We discuss a novel approach of SyD (System on Devices)wrapper framework for dynamically creating and executing web bonds among various heterogeneous web services. The wrapper is a lightweight SyD application object that encapsulates composition and coordination logic and provides higher level of coordination among bonded entities. The wrapper framework gives small devices full capability to run distributed collaborative applications that use heterogeneous web services. We have also developed and analyzed experiments to showcase the performance of SyD Wrapper Framework.

Handheld computers may hold the possibility for a one-to-one computer: student ratio. The impact of the use of Palm® (Palm, Inc.) handhelds on information acquisition and use by 5th grade students in a North Texas school during a class research project was investigated. Five research questions were examined using observation, interviews, surveys, and document analysis. Are there differences in information gathering and use with the Palm between gifted, dyslexic, and regular learners? What relevance criteria do students use to evaluate a web site to determine whether to download the site to the Palm and afterwards whether to use the downloaded site's information in the report? How do the Palms affect the writing process? Do the animations and concept maps produced on the Palm demonstrate understanding of the intended concepts? Are there significant differences in results (i.e., final products grade) between Palm users and non-Palm users? Three groups of learners in the class, gifted, dyslexic, and regular learners, participated in the study. The regular and dyslexic students reported using Web sites that had not been downloaded to the Palm. Students reported several factors used to decide whether to download Web sites, but the predominant deciding factor was the amount of information. The students used a combination of writing on paper and the Palm in the preparation of the report. Many students flipped between two programs, FreeWrite and Fling-It, finding information and then writing the facts into the report. The peer review process was more difficult with the Palm. Most students had more grammatical errors in this research report than in previous research projects. By creating animated drawings on the Palm handheld, the students demonstrated their understanding of the invention though sometimes the media or the student's drawing skills limited the quality of the final product. Creating the animations was motivational and addressed different learning styles than a written report alone. No statistically significant difference was found in the scores of the three 6+1 Traits categories, however the Palm users didn't meet the page-length requirement for the research project but the majority of the control class did.

Two of the biggest issues facing large organizations today are knowledge transfer from the retiring Baby Boomers to their younger replacements, the Gamers, and the retention of those younger employees. Retirees are replaced by people 34 years old or younger who think, learn, believe, respond, and work differently further increasing the cultural gap that must be traversed in order to successfully transfer knowledge. This younger demographic is raised on technology and may not remember a time when there were no computers, video games, mobile devices, and the Internet. Large organizations aspiring to stay relevant must learn to take advantage of these unique traits. For organization that utilize repetitive work processes involving ruggedized handheld computing tools, both of these issues mentioned can be remediated through the adoption of modern technology. Some ruggedized handheld device manufacturers, however, have been hesitant to embrace consumer-implemented solutions such as the removal of all physical keys in order to incorporate touchscreen only input. Using Baby Boomer and Gamer-aged workers from a large transportation company experienced with ruggedized handheld devices, a time and error evaluation was performed to determine which input type is best by generation. This study found that moving from physical keyed devices to ruggedized handhelds with touchscreens only is a productive move for an industrial workforce but it’s the Boomers who stand to benefit from this change the most, not the Gamers. This study also identified near future requirements for the next iteration of ruggedized handheld devices based on the expectations of members of the current and future workforce. Results showed that participants from all generations selected a device that followed the touchscreen only model for data input. Experienced users from all generations preferred a smaller device with a large screen size. Lastly, Lean and Six Sigma were combined and their benefits explored in an effort of implementing manufacturing quality tools into a global, service-based, logistics organization. These tools and principles were used to improve the quality and timeliness of selecting and implementing a new ruggedized handheld device for the line-level workers on a global scale.

MSc. thesis deals with mobile digital assistant T-Mobile MDA II running Linux operating system. The first part presents device identification and parameters' specification of the MDA II. The second part focuses on selection of GNU distribution with Linux bootloader and Linux kernel support comparison. The subject of the last part is MDA II component code implementation and its merging into Linux kernel.