The ubiquitous use of mobile devices and smartphones in the United States presents an interesting opportunity for application developers with respect to emergency management. Software engineers from the federal government to individuals have recognized the unique prospect of utilizing always-connected devices to assist in emergency notification, preparedness, and response. The federal government has instituted and ratified multiple acts and mandates with respect to mobile communications during a crisis such as the Commercial Mobile Alert System. Likewise, individual organizations and developers have created mobile applications that access weather alerts from the National Weather Service. Many of these applications utilize push notification architectures to notify users and stakeholders about impeding emergency situations. While most of these applications are geared towards a national audience, there are a few that are highly granular with a focus on the local community. This thesis presents a universal iOS application running on all iOS mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch for the Virginia Tech community. The application is highly granular with respect to emergency response guidance and notification by providing clear, concise, and supportive information to citizens during a crisis. Additionally, the application provides another medium of delivery for the Office of Emergency Management at Virginia Tech to potentially mitigate the extent of collateral damage and secondary incidents while saving lives. / Master of Science

Education plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of any nation. Researchers, pedagogists, and teachers all over the world are constantly working towards improving the process of teaching at all levels of education in order to help impart knowledge in a more effective way. One of the most fundamental branches of education is mathematics. Unless a strong foundation is laid in childhood, it becomes difficult for adults to apply mathematics to their daily lives. Mathematics is such a field that it is integrated in most of our activities. Fractions, a mathematics topic, pose significant challenges for middle school students Although the students generally understand proper fractions (i.e., the numerator is smaller than the denominator), they find it very difficult to learn improper fractions (i.e., the numerator is greater than the denominator). One cannot do away with parts of mathematics curriculum, just because the concept is hard to grasp. The solution is to come up with alternative methods to teach these concepts, such that they are easier to understand and more fun to learn. This thesis describes a digital game-based solution for teaching fractions to middle school students using iOS mobile devices, i.e., iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. We developed a universal iOS game, called Candy Factory, which runs on all iOS mobile devices. The game assigns the student the role of the owner of a Candy Factory and tasks the student to manufacture a candy bar to match the kind and size of a customer order from a whole candy bar that is retrieved from the warehouse. The game is created to teach fractions based on the concept of partitioning and iterating. The student performs various activities such as partitioning, iterating, and measuring to produce the candy bar to satisfy the customer requirements. The game consists of three levels, which help the student progress smoothly from easier problems to more difficult ones. The Candy Factory game, not only helps students learn the fundamentals of fractions, but also makes the learning process enjoyable. / Master of Science

Advances in information technology are driving massive improvement to the education industry. The ubiquity of mobile devices has triggered a shift in the delivery of educational content. More lessons in a wide range of subjects are being disseminated by allowing students to access digital materials through mobile devices. One of the key materials is digital-based educational games. These games merge education with digital games to maximize engagement while somewhat obfuscating the learning process. The effectiveness is generally measured by assessments, either after or during gameplay, in the form of quizzes, data dumps, and/or manual analyses. Valuable gameplay information lost during the student's play sessions. This gameplay data provides educators and researchers with specific gameplay actions students perform in order to arrive at a solution, not just the correctness of the solution. This problem illustrates a need for a tool, enabling educators and players to quickly analyze gameplay data. in conjunction with correctness in an unobtrusive manner while the student is playing the game. This thesis describes a client-server software architecture that enables the collection of game-based data during gameplay. We created a collection of web services that enables games to transmit game-data for analysis. Additionally, the web application provides players with a portal to login and view various visualization of the captured data. Lastly, we created a game called "Taffy Town", a mathematics-based game that requires the player to manipulate taffy pieces in order to solve various fractions. Taffy Town transmits students' taffy transformations along with correctness to the web application. Students are able to view several dynamically created visualizations from the data sent by Taffy Town. Researchers are able to log in to the web application and see the same visualizations, however, aggregated across all Taffy Town players. This end-to-end mapping of problems, actions, and results will enable researchers, pedagogists, and teachers to improve the effectiveness of educational games. / Master of Science