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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development and assessment of learning support environments for academic writing that utilize ICT, such as e-learning and online tutoring, in Japanese higher education. First, the authors introduce the design of an e-learning writing program for the Japanese language and assess whether the program is an effective learning support tool for undergraduates. Second, the authors analyze and assess online tutoring support for academic writing and clarify the merits and disadvantages of online and offline tutoring at writing centers, then suggest instructional strategies by analyzing the writing tutoring process.

The authors adopted e-learning goals to assess its effectiveness. The authors asked the participants questions they could answer from five-point scales, conducted a paired t-test, and included a free description-type questionnaire. Then, to assess online tutoring, the 12 students took pre- and post-test questionnaires, after which the authors conducted a Wilcoxon signed rank test. In addition, the authors carried out a Kruskal–Wallis rank sum test in order to confirm differences in satisfaction level and the effectiveness of face-to-face tutoring and online tutoring.

By analyzing the pre- and post-test results, the t-test confirmed that the students found the e-learning system to be effective for nurturing academic literacy. This means the system is appropriate as a support tool for nurturing academic writing, especially writing knowledge and rules, and university must provide a comprehensive learning support environment including e-learning. Next, the authors found no statistically significant difference between face-to-face and online tutoring, although some problems with the writing process remained. So online tutoring has opportunity to promote autonomous learning. The research results make it clear that because of writing centers’ potential and their effectiveness in utilizing ICT tools.

Research findings about academic writing are to improve the tutoring process and writing strategies, such as the use of ICT for academic writing support like e-learning, online tutoring, do not exist. To provide learning opportunity to learners and promote autonomous learning, e-learning and online tutoring are important. For the reasons noted above, it is necessary to provide an alternative writing support environment to students in Japan. Therefore, the authors report on and assess the development of learning support environments for e-learning programs and online tutoring for academic writing at the undergraduate level in Japan.

Bulk material-handling equipment development can be accelerated and is less expensive when testing of virtual prototypes can be adopted. However, often the complexity of the interaction between particulate material and handling equipment cannot be handled by a single computational solver. This paper aims to establish a framework for the development, verification and application of a co-simulation of discrete element method (DEM) and multibody dynamics (MBD).

The two methods have been coupled in two directions, which consists of coupling the load data on the geometry from DEM to MBD and the position data from MBD to DEM. The coupling has been validated thoroughly in several scenarios, and the stability and robustness have been investigated.

All tests clearly demonstrated that the co-simulation is successful in predicting particle–equipment interaction. Examples are provided describing the effects of a coupling that is too tight, as well as a coupling that is too loose. A guideline has been developed for achieving stable and efficient co-simulations.

This framework shows how to achieve realistic co-simulations of particulate material and equipment interaction of a dynamic nature.

The evolution of technologies has unleashed a wealth of challenges by generating massive amount of data. Recently, biological data has increased exponentially, which has introduced several computational challenges. DNA short read alignment is an important problem in bioinformatics. The exponential growth in the number of short reads has increased the need for an ideal platform to accelerate the alignment process. Apache Spark is a cluster-computing framework that involves data parallelism and fault tolerance. In this article, we proposed a Spark-based algorithm to accelerate DNA short reads alignment problem, and it is called Spark-DNAligning. Spark-DNAligning exploits Apache Spark ’s performance optimizations such as broadcast variable, join after partitioning, caching, and in-memory computations. Spark-DNAligning is evaluated in term of performance by comparing it with SparkBWA tool and a MapReduce based algorithm called CloudBurst. All the experiments are conducted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Results demonstrate that Spark-DNAligning outperforms both tools by providing a speedup in the range of 101–702 in aligning gigabytes of short reads to the human genome. Empirical evaluation reveals that Apache Spark offers promising solutions to DNA short reads alignment problem.

The conducted examination of programming affordances and constraints had the purpose of adding knowledge and value that facilitate the on-going national curricula revision; knowledge that also could be of general interest outside the Swedish K-12 context.

With a qualitative approach, the study was conducted as a document analysis where submitted lesson plans were the base for a directed content analysis.

This study presents findings on how the involvement of programming in mathematics and technology have potential to foster engagement and motivation among students. Findings also indicate that the implementation of programming can develop important general skills that go beyond the boundaries of mathematics and technology. Moreover, the identified constraints could be valuable to improve the on-going curriculum development for K-12 mathematics and technology.

This qualitative study was conducted on a relatively small number of teachers where the majority has taken the courses on a voluntary basis. An important complement would be to conduct a larger quantitative study with data from a more general sample of K-12 teachers.

Results and discussions provide guidance for K-12 teachers and other stakeholders who want to introduce programming as a complementary tool in teaching and learning activities.

The study has a contribution to the on-going implementation of the Swedish national curricula for K-12 mathematics and technology.

During the last years, many studies have been published on teacher training in programming, and how the training can be improved. This study goes beyond the actual teacher training and examine aspects teachers translate to theirs daily work after completing the training.