Inclusive Musical Game Technology for Children

CAOIMHE CAMILLERI | SUPERVISOR: Dr Peter Albert Xuereb COURSE: B.Sc. IT (Hons.) Software Development

This research proposes a novel teaching aid aimed at teachers within music schools and their students, including students of music with special needs. Previous research has successfully used modified or specifically built data gloves for this purpose. Data gloves worn by both teacher and student could convey real-time guidance and feedback by detecting the state of the fingers through strain gauges – and conveying feedback to the student using miniature vibrating devices incorporated into the gloves.

This study proposes a flexible approach, whereby the gloves could either respond to live performance by a teacher or use existing MIDI music files as a source. This would allow teachers to cater for more students simultaneously and facilitate practising at home. Furthermore, recording and playback facilities would allow the performances of teachers and students to be recorded for repeated training or evaluation exercises respectively.

For the purpose of this study, a set of fabric gloves were fitted with strain gauges to measure the angle of each finger, thereby detecting which keys were being pressed. Similarly, small vibrating devices were attached to the fingers in order to give feedback to the student or to indicate the correct keys to press. A third device equipped with a loudspeaker was also included so as to provide auditory feedback to the user.

The software was designed in object-oriented C++ and developed using the Arduino IDE, which is a more user-friendly option than the native ESP-IDF environment provided by Espressif. Wi-Fi was chosen as the preferred communication medium due to its additional range and bandwidth over Bluetooth. This would allow the various devices to communicate with each other, as well as with user devices through a web interface that would allow the users to control, monitor and upload MIDI files to the devices.

Figure 1. Hardware diagram

Software Engineering & Web Applications Optimising sports scheduling through constraint satisfaction

MANDY CARUANA | SUPERVISOR: Mr Tony Spiteri Staines | CO-SUPERVISOR: Dr Peter Xuereb COURSE: B.Sc. IT (Hons.) Computing and Business

Sports scheduling is a research area that has received significant interest over the past thirty years. Strategic thinking is vital when generating a sport schedule, as it has a great impact on its stakeholders, namely: club owners, technical staff and players, television broadcasters and the supporters. Automated sport scheduling achieves greater revenues as opposed to generating a schedule manually. This is due to better allocation of resources, highly anticipated matches being broadcast at more advantageous times, with a strong relationship being maintained between the sports association and the supporters due to favourable times.

The nature of any schedule is determined by hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints are conditions that must be satisfied, such as league regulations and TV broadcasting contracts. Soft constraints focus on expectations of supporters, players, and technical staff. A schedule must meet all hard constraints and as many soft constraints as possible. Some examples of these constraints include venue availability, dates and times, and the travelling team problem.

Prior to developing a solution, a study regarding different types of scheduling algorithms for sports leagues ‒ both professional and amateur ‒ was conducted to clearly identify the requirements of the system. Interviews with experts within the domain were held to further investigate how sports tournaments schedules are done in Malta. On the basis of the findings, prototypes and models were created before progressing to the development stage. This led to the development of an ASP.Net Core MVC Web Application, which allows the user to manage all necessary data. Constraint programming algorithms were used to develop the schedule. The system was evaluated by using and comparing results from two different algorithms, and official fixtures created for previous years. The main focus was to obtain a reduction in the time taken to create the fixtures and distance travelled, in order to handle hard constraints as efficiently as possible and, similarly, to increase the level of satisfaction in terms of soft constraints.

Figure 1. Sample result showing fixtures of a football league