Open Access

The exponential growth in knowledge coupled with the decreasing knowledge half-life creates a challenging situation for educational programs - particularly those preparing software engineers for their very dynamic high-technology field. Teachers in high technology education areas are challenged in selecting and making relevant knowledge intuitively accessible to students, especially with regard the highly dynamic digital and software technologies. This paper contributes a knowledge nexus-based multimedia approach aligned with Higher Education 4.0 for creating learning apps on mobile devices that support multiple didactic models, leverage intrinsic curiosity and motivation, support gamification, and enable digital collaboration. Object recognition is used to trigger learning paths, and various didactic methods are supported via workflow-like learning flows to support group or team-based learning. A prototype app was realized to demonstrate its feasibility and an empirical evaluation in software engineering shows the didactic potential and advantages of the approach, which can be readily generalized and applied to the arts, sciences, etc.

Nowadays, businesses with focus on consumer-products are challenged by short production cycles, high pricing pressure, and the need to deliver new features and services in a regular interval. Currently, businesses are tackling these challenges by automating their business pro- cesses, while yet trying to be flexible by introducing methods for process variability modeling. However, for larger processes and variability models, it becomes difficult to consider, maintain, and optimize all process variations in the various execution contexts. In software development, highly agile requirements are usually tackled with a flexible microservice architecture. Nonetheless, the fast-changing service landscape is often not fully reflected in the underlying business processes, leading to inefficiency and loss of profit. With this work, we extend our framework for process variability modeling with concepts of Microflows, allowing agile business process modeling and orchestration while utilizing the full flexibility of underlying microservices. In addition, we present a case study, showing how this approach is used in the context of an IoT application

While Virtual Reality (VR) has been applied to various domains to provide new visualization and interaction capabilities, enabling programmers to utilize VR for their software development and maintenance tasks has been insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present the Hyper-Display Environment (HyDE) in the form of a mixed-reality (HyDE-MR) or virtual reality (HyDE-VR) variant respectively, which provides simultaneous multiple operating system window visualization with integrated keyboard/mouse viewing and interaction using MR or in pure VR via a virtual keyboard. This paper applies HyDE in a software development case study as an alternative to typical non-VR Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), supporting software engineering tasks with multiple live screens in VR as an augmented virtuality. The MR solution concept enables programmers to benefit from VR visualization and virtually unlimited information displays while supporting their more natural keyboard interaction for basic code-centric tasks. Thus, developers can leverage VR paradigms and capabilities while directly interacting with their favorite tools to develop and maintain program code. A prototype implementation is described, with a case study demonstrating its feasibility and an initial empirical study showing its potential.