Philipp Brune

Philipp Brune

Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are current hot topics in research and practice. However, the potentials of their combination have been studied just recently to a larger extend. While different use cases for combining AI and blockchain have been discussed, the idea of enabling blockchain-based smart contracts to perform "smarter" decisions by using AI or machine learning (ML) models has only been considered on the conceptual level so far. It remained open, how such AI-enabled smart contracts could be implemented in a robust way for real-world applications. Therefore, in this paper a new, enterprise-class implementation of AI-enabled smart contracts is presented and first insights regarding its feasibility are discussed.

Erica Janke, Philipp Brune, Stefan Wagner

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is widely used in the software industry and university introductory courses today. Following the structure of most textbooks, such courses frequently are organised starting with the concepts of imperative and structured programming and only later introducing OOP. An alternative approach is to begin directly with OOP following the Outside-In teaching method as proposed by Meyer. Empirical results for the effects of Outside-In teaching on students and lecturers are sparse, however. We describe the conceptual design and empirical evaluation of two OOP introductory courses from different universities based on Outside-In teaching. The evaluation results are compared to those from a third course serving as the control group, which was taught OOP the "traditional" way. We evaluate the initial motivation and knowledge of the participants and the learning outcomes. In addition, we analyse results of the end-term exams and qualitatively analyse the results of interviews with the lecturers and tutors. Regarding the learning outcomes, the results show no signif- icant differences between the Outside-In and the "traditional" teaching method. In general, students found it harder to solve and implement algorithmic problems than to understand object oriented (OO) concepts. Students taught OOP by the Outside-In method, however, were less afraid that they would not pass the exam at the end of term and understood the OO paradigm more quickly. Therefore, the Outside-In method is no silver bullet for teaching OOP regarding the learning outcomes but has positive effects on motivation and interest.