Do Computers Understand Art?

Researchers from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute have demonstrated that certain mathematical algorithms can offer clues about a painting's artistic style, although this is still a far cry from human-like artistic interpretation. The research team has shown that some artificial vision algorithms mean a computer can be programmed to "understand" an image and distinguish artistic styles based on low-level pictorial data, which covers such aspects as brush thickness, the type of material, and the composition of the color palette. Medium-level information encompasses differentiation between certain objects and scenes appearing in an image, as well as the type of painting. High-level information accounts for the historical context as well as knowledge of the artists and artistic trends. "It will never be possible to precisely determine mathematically an artistic period nor to measure the human response to a work of art, but we can look for trends," says study co-author Miquel Feixas. The researchers' analysis of various artificial vision algorithms used for art classification discovered that certain aesthetic measurements--calculating the order of the image by examining pixels and color distribution--along with the composition and diversity of the color palette, can be helpful. The researchers plan to apply their work to the development of image viewing and analysis tools, the classification of and search for museum collections, the creation of public informative and entertainment gear, and a better understanding of the interplay between people, computers, and works of art.

Learning Programming From Scratch

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Mitchel Resnick and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have enjoyed great success with Scratch, a computer programming language geared toward children ages eight to 16. Scratch users write code by connecting graphical blocks together. Concurrent with the launch of Scratch two years ago was the rollout of the Scratch Web site, where programmers can publish their Scratch projects online and share them with others. Nearly 800,000 projects have been uploaded to the site since its launch, and the site has nurtured an online community that enables sharing and collaboration on Scratch projects. Resnick's motivation behind Scratch's creation was to make programming fun for kids as part of an effort to get young people more interested in computer science as well as achieve fluency in digital technologies. Resnick and his team believe Scratch is an important tool through which computer science concepts can be introduced to students. The team is creating support materials and cooperating with educators on the best way to use Scratch in the classroom. Resnick believes that digital fluency is becoming increasingly essential for many careers, including those that are outside of technology, such as the creative arts. He notes, for example, that Scratch is being used in English courses as a tool to help produce book reports.

Microsoft's Vision of Computing

Over the next 10 years, how people interact with computers will evolve drastically, with hand gesture controls becoming as common as keyboards, and file selection being determined by eye scans instead of mouse movements, predicts Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie. "Today, most people's interaction is through a screen--whether they touch it, type it, point or click, it's still just graphical user interface," Mundie says. "While that's very powerful and has a lot of applicability, I think it will be supplemented in dramatic ways by what we call a natural user interface." He says computers will soon be able to emulate the human senses of sight, hearing, speech, touch, and gesture, and combine them in multiple ways for people to interact with machines. The interactivity revolution will be fueled by new multiprocessor computers, which are expected to be widely available by 2012. Mundie says these new processors should provide a major performance gain, with some performances increasing by a factor of 100. One of the first major commercial applications of the new interface technology is expected to be released next year when Microsoft launches its new line of Xbox gaming consoles, which will completely eliminate the need for handheld controllers. Mundie says the new gaming interface enables players to move and use gesture controls, with the system calculating in real time the angular position of the 22 major joints in the body. Mundie envisions a day when users will simply be able to talk to their computers about solving problems. "You should be able to describe the problem or the policy you want and the computer should be able to somehow implement that," he says.

Ten Emerging Technologies to Watch in 2010

The editors at EE Times have compiled a list of 10 emerging technologies to watch in 2010. First, biofeedback or thought-control of electronics could give people with disabilities, the military, and consumers new ways to control user interfaces. Second, the possibility of rapidly printing multiple conductive, insulating, and semiconductive layers to create electronics could significantly lower the cost of manufacturing electronics. Third, the development of plastic memory could lead to rewritable, non-volatile memory capable of retaining data for more than 10 years and one million cycles. Fourth, maskless lithography could be a spoiler in the effort to replace immersion lithography with extreme ultraviolet lithography. Fifth, parallel processing will become better understood and more widely used as initiatives such as OpenCL and Cuda expand the understanding of how multiple processors will be programmed and used for increased computational and power efficiency. Sixth, energy harvesting will increasingly be used in devices, such as vibration-powered wireless sensors on machinery or vehicles, or motion-powered mobile phones. Seventh, biology and technology will continue to merge, building off of devices such as under-the-skin tags for pets and heart pacemakers for humans. Eighth, resistive RAM, or the memristor, will continue to evolve. Ninth, the depth of the interconnect stack on top of the leading-edge silicon surface could lead to a splitting of front-end fab production into surface and local interconnect. Finally, various batter technologies will emerge to power an increasingly diverse number of devices.

Facebook Offers Poor Personal Data Protection

A study of Norwegian Internet users and social media found that people are willing to post their personal information on social media sites even when they are not aware how it will be used. Conducted by SINTEF for the Norwegian Consumers' Council, the researchers found that 60 percent of Norweigan Internet users are on Facebook. SINTEF's Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Marika Luders conclude that Facebook offers relatively poor personal data protection due to the service itself, its design, the level of competence of its users, and their lack of awareness of how to protect themselves. "Facebook has become an important arena for social participation in our personal environment," Brandtzaeg says. "However, it is becoming ever more easy to gather and aggregate personal information, outside the control of users." Still, people are willing to post their personal information because so many other people use Facebook, and they rarely hear of unfortunate incidents. Respondents were usually not aware that Facebook uses personal information for commercial purposes, and their personal information also can be used against them, such as when they apply for a job. The researchers say that people and objects will be woven together ever more closely by the next wave of Internet media such as Google Wave and mobile smartphones. "This can make us even more vulnerable to failures of personal data protection," Luders says.

Google's Go Programming Language

Google has unveiled Go, a new programming language the company says offers the speed of working in a dynamic language such as Python and the performance and safety of a compiled language such as C or C++. "Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection," according to the Google Go team in a blog post. However, Google is not using the experimental language internally for production systems. Instead, Google is conducting experiments with Go as a candidate server environment. "The Go project was conceived to make it easier to write the kind of servers and other software Google uses internally, but the implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use," according to the FAQ on the Go language's Web site. With Go, developers should find builds to be spontaneous. Large binaries will compile in just a few seconds, and the code will run close to the speed of C. Go is the second programming environment Google has released this fall. In September, Google released Noop, a Java-like programming language.

Mobile Supercomputers

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the future of computing lies in smart mobile devices and data centers. "A billion people on the planet are carrying supercomputers in their hands," Schmidt says. "Now you think of them as mobile phones, but that's not what they really are. They're video cameras. They're GPS devices. They're powerful computers. They have powerful screens. They can do many, many different things." Schmidt says over the next few years mobile technology will continue to advance and consumers will be exposed to new applications that are unimaginable now. For example, Google's Android phone division is working on an application that can take pictures of bar codes, identify the corresponding product, and compare prices online. Another Android application can translate a picture of a menu written in a foreign language. Cloud computing will provide the computational muscle for many of these future services, which Schmidt says is probably the next big wave in computing. He also believes that computing will continue to bring major changes to our society. "We're going from a model where the information we had was pretty highly controlled by centralized media operatives to a world where most of our information will come from our friends, from our peers, from user-generated content," Schmidt says. "These changes are profound in the society of America, in the social life, and all the ways we live."

The Latest Technologies

Five new technologies are on their way that will give users unprecedented access to data thanks to new high-speed connections and user interfaces. First, USB 3.0 is a new standard that preserves backward compatibility by allowing older cables to plug into new jacks, but features an extra pin that boosts the data rate to 4.8 Gbps. USB 3.0, dubbed SuperSpeed by the USB Implementers Forum, can transfer a 30 GB video in just over a minute. Second, by 2012, two new wireless protocols--802.11ac and 802.11ad--should be able to provide over-the-air data transmissions of 1 Gbps or faster. The faster wireless data rate will enable users to stream multiple high-definition videos throughout a room or house. Third, the next wave of next-generation TVs will allow viewers to experience three-dimensional (3D) videos at home. 3D TVs are likely to rely on alternating left-eye and right-eye views for successive frames. Many HDTVs already operate at 120 Hz, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can see is already available. This type of 3D viewing will require glasses that use rapid shutters to alternate the view to each eye, but TV manufacturers also are working on 3D sets that do not require glasses. Fourth, augmented reality in mobile devices will become increasingly popular as consumers expect to be able to receive information on any subject in any location. Researchers also are developing contact lenses capable of projecting images into someone's sight. Finally, HTML5 promises to do away with browser conformity issues and the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. HTML5 will enable designers to create Web sites that work the same on every browser and give users a better and faster Web experience.

3M Jobs for I.T. Professionals in Asia-Pacific

Nearly three million jobs are expected to be created by the Asia-Pacific region's information technology (IT) industry by 2013, according to a new IDC study, which also projects 4.8 percent growth in IT spending each year for the next four years. "Innovation in technology will play a vital role in enabling new business opportunities and employment growth throughout Asia," says Microsoft's Emilio Umeoka. "IT will be a catalyst for the wider economic recovery, as companies take advantage of technology solutions to improve their cost base and service outcomes." The study involved the participation of more than 50 nations, and focused on IT's contribution to gross domestic product, IT job creation, software sector employment, formation of new companies, local IT spending, and tax revenues. The study predicts that 32,000 new businesses will be created by higher IT spending by 2013, with the majority of those companies being small and locally owned. Singapore's IT spending is expected to grow by almost 2 percent a year through 2013 and create approximately 17,000 new IT jobs. The study names cloud computing as the next major IT development area, and anticipates that the sector could generate close to $300 billion in net new business revenues to the Asia-Pacific region's economy by the end of 2013.

Robots in Education

Robots are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in education. The Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to design a robot capable of traveling to the moon, is being envisioned for children by the X Prize Foundation, Google, Lego Systems, and National Instruments on MoonBots. The winner of the Google Lunar X prize can send his or her robot to the moon to gather information, photographs, and video footage to send back to Earth. Children can assemble robots that imitate the same tasks using a Lego Mindstorm kit. The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a Senior Capstone Program in Engineering (Scope) that asks students to work on a large engineering project that simulates the kind of problems they would tackle in the corporate world. Vision Robotics Corp (VRC) has asked the Scope group to help them design fruit-picking robots. The first robot finds the fruit, and the second picks it. The team of seniors designed an end effector that can select the fruit, and the device has been added to a working model of the fruit-picker. Researchers from Nanyang Polytechnic, Schmid Engineering, and Analog Devices--from Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.S., respectively--have put together a spider robot that can crawl into small places and across difficult surfaces. Equipped with six legs, the robot can move in any direction, either slowly with all six of its limbs or more quickly with just three. Scope director David Barrett says that robots are the new groundbreaking technology, in use today "in the military, in industries and the consumer level."

Open Web Education Alliance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is creating the Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA), a new body designed to help ensure that educational institutions around the world are providing Web professionals and information technology graduates with the skills the industry needs. OWEA co-chair John Allsopp says students might learn things that are relevant to their role in the industry, but the fast-evolving nature of the Web often requires Web practitioners to teach themselves new skills. "The goal is to create a sustainable organization to promote best practices in education for Web professionals, working to both develop curricula itself and promote this within universities, colleges, private education providers, and inside large organizations," Allsopp says. "There's a strong belief within the industry that something like this is really needed and we are currently investigating different models of sustainability for the organization." OWEA, which is expected to launch in 2010, is preparing a white paper on its operational plans for the W3C. A dozen international Web professionals are involved with OWEA, which also is backed by Microsoft, Adobe, and Opera Software.

Wimax: City-Wide Wireless Service

Cities will be transformed by WiMax, smart grids, social networks, and other emerging technologies, once they are cohesively integrated. WiMax is seen as a critical tool for supporting city-wide wireless services. WiMax offers more ubiquitous access than Wi-Fi, because WiMax is available throughout a given area while Wi-Fi hot spots require users to search for them. The notion of the smart grid is oriented around the idea of using electricity when it is available at low cost rather than at peak periods, and the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid via two-way communication between utility companies and the businesses and individuals who use their power. There might be a central command center for overseeing and adjusting power usage and for delivering information technology (IT) services through WiMax, but the actual IT operation could reside in the computing cloud rather than in the city's data center. Social networking technology also is being tapped to provide online services through which citizens can keep up with local developments and comment on neighborhood issues. For example, Dublin, Ohio, uses networking software to operate a portal where government officials can post blogs, engage in dialogue via instant messaging, and share documents. Dublin plans to make the private network accessible to all citizens over the next several months.

LifeLogging

Pioneering Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been recording and storing virtually every aspect of his daily life in an effort to build a searchable electronic memory for everyone, and he speculates that increasing numbers of people will be doing the same in the future. He envisions the practice of lifelogging as the logical next step up from social networking. The cell phone is already a rudimentary instrument for lifelogging, and support of the practice is increasing as phones add more features to record daily activities. Concurrent with this trend is the development of specialized devices and Web services geared toward lifelogging enthusiasts. For example, Zeo is a sleep-monitoring gadget that maps out the patterns and quality of each night's sleep, while an accompanying Web service helps users optimize their sleep habits. Livescribe, meanwhile, is a digital pen that converts notes and sketches into image files and records the sound of conversations, lectures, and conferences. Analyst Esther Dyson forecasts that markets will open for software to "extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data."

Scala Programming Language

The Scala programming language, which runs on the Java Virtual Machine, could become the preferred language of the modern Web 2.0 startup, according to a Twitter developer. Scala creator Martin Odersky says the name Scala "means scalable language in the sense that you can start very small but take it a long way." He says he developed the language out of a desire to integrate functional and object-oriented programming. This combination brings together functional programming's ability to build interesting things out of simple elements and object-oriented programming's ability to organize a system's components and to extend or adapt complex systems. "The challenge was to combine the two so that it would not feel like two languages working side by side but would be combined into one single language," Odersky says. The challenge lay in identifying constructs from the functional programming side with constructs from the object-oriented programming side, he says. Odersky lists the creation of the compiler technology as a particularly formidable challenge he faced in Scala's development. He notes that support of interoperability entailed mapping everything from Java to Scala, while another goal of the Scala developers was making the language fun to use. "This is a very powerful tool that we give to developers, but it has two sides," Odersky says. "It gives them a lot of freedom but with that comes the responsibility to avoid misuse."

Online vs Clasroom Education

Students' performance in online education settings tended to trounce that of those receiving face-to-face instruction, according to a study SRI International carried out for the U.S. Education Department. The study analyzed the comparative research on traditional versus online education over a 12-year period, with the bulk of the studies done in colleges and various adult continuing-education programs. The report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses, and an analysis determined that students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance on average, versus the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. Lead study author Barbara Means says the report indicates that online learning often outclasses traditional instruction, and the report suggests that online education could experience sharp growth during the next several years. Experts say the real promise of online education is delivering learning experiences that are more customized to individual students than classrooms, which facilitates more learning by doing. Philip R. Regier, with Arizona State University's Online and Extended Campus program, expects continuing education programs to exhibit the most growth in the near term, and he also predicts that online education will continue to gain ground in the transformation of college campuses. Regier says the growing use of social networking technology will hasten the evolution of online learning into a model where students help and teach each other by creating new forms of learning communities.

International Symposium on Wikis

The explosive growth of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia is petering out, while a less welcoming attitude toward new contributors could negatively affect the archive's quality in the long term, according to a team of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) researchers. The number of articles added to the Web site per month reached a plateau at 60,000 three years ago and has since fallen by about one-third, while the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped expanding in 2007. Occasional editors' power has thinned as more active and established editors come to dominate, and infrequent contributors have a greater percentage of their additions deleted or reverted by other editors than they did before. "This is evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content," says the PARC team. PARC researcher Ed Chi cautions that this resistance could hurt Wikipedia in the longer term by discouraging participation by new editors, thus reducing the number of editors available to identify and repair vandalism. "Over time the quality may degrade," Chi says. The PARC researchers will present their findings at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration in October. Blue Oxen Associates' Eugene Eric Kim, who is helping to lead a review of Wikipedia launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, says there are several possible reasons for the changes Wikipedia has undergone. He posits, for example, that the increasing use of spam software that embeds promotional text in articles may actually be responsible for the high number of reverts.

Shortage of Cyber Defenders

A consortium that includes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the SANS Institute, and the U.S. Department of Defense aims to cultivate a new generation of computer security and network administration experts with a triathlon of contests designed to inspire students to become technically proficient in protecting cyberspace. SANS Institute research director Alan Paller points to a shortage of cyberdefenders graduating from schools, estimating that the United States needs about 20,000 to 30,000 people capable of competing in a cybercompetition, versus about 1,000 now. The U.S. Cyber Challenge includes DC3's Digital Forensics Competition, in which teams vie to solve a series of puzzles that an expert might encounter when probing a crime. Almost 600 teams have registered for the contest so far this year, compared to 199 teams in 2008. The second contest is the CyberPatriot High School Cyber Defense Competition, whose goal is to nurture high school students' knowledge of network defense. The contest is run by the Air Force Association and the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security. The third competition is NetWars, a SANS Institute-hosted capture-the-flag tournament waged on a virtual private network over the Internet. Teams are awarded points for assaulting other teams' virtual machines and commandeering certain services and files. Players attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in their rivals' systems and then protect the systems they compromised from the other attackers. The federal government has not announced funding for the U.S. Cyber Challenge, but companies such as Google and state governments such as Delaware have already expressed interest in participating in the competitions.

Microsoft Faculty Summit

Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says future computers will do more work for people autonomously with less reliance on human input. "I've lately taken to talking about computing more as going from a world where today they work at our command to where they work on our behalf," Mundie says. At Microsoft's recent annual Faculty Summit, Mundie addressed a group of university professors and government officials. He emphasized that computers are still only tools, and that unless users have done an apprenticeship to learn how to master the tool they are unlikely to use computers to their full capabilities. Microsoft's shift in focus to more autonomous computers comes after 10 to 15 years of working to enhance human-computer interfaces, including handwriting, gesture, voice, and touch interaction. "The question is, Can't we change the way in which people interact with machines such that they are much better to anticipate what you want to do and provide a richer form of interaction?" Mundie asks. He compares the current shift in computing technology to when people realized they could use video cameras to piece together pieces of film to create a movie, instead of just recording entire plays. In one demonstration, Mundie used gestures to move documents and files around wall surfaces in the office of the future, where any surface is part of a virtual world, and used a virtual keyboard on the screen in his desk.

Future of Artificial Intelligence

The lack of a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics impelled engineer Leon Chua to develop one, which led to the formulation of the memristor--a theoretical fourth basic circuit element in addition to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor where electric charge and magnetic flux come together. Since then the creation of memristors has been achieved, and their novel abilities might unlock key insights about the human brain that would be a tremendous step forward for the field of artificial intelligence. Advantages of memristors include rapid, nanosecond writing of data using a very small amount of energy, and retention of memristive memory even when the power is turned off. The most immediate potential application for memristors is as a flash memory replacement, while durability improvements should make memristors ideal for a superfast random access memory, says Hewlett-Packard (HP) Laboratories Fellow Stan Williams. The discovery that a slime mold was behaving in the manner of a memristive circuit in that it could memorize a pattern of events without the aid of a neuron inspired a physicist at the University of California, San Diego to construct a circuit capable of learning and predicting future signals. Much earlier, Chua had noticed a sharp similarity between synapse behavior and memristor response, leading to speculation that memristors might help engineer an electronic intelligence that can mimic the power of a brain. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has embarked on a project to create "electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels." HP's Greg Snider has envisioned the field of cortical computing that focuses on the potential of memristors to imitate the interaction of the brain's neurons. He and Williams are working with Boston University scientists to devise hybrid transistor-memristor chips that aim to replicate some of the brain's thought processes.

Mind-Reading Computers

Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed technology that gives computers the ability to understand speech imagined in the mind. "The idea is to basically connect people with devices and machines through their thoughts directly," says Washington University Medical School neurologist Eric Leuthardt. The research is based on brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which monitors brainwaves and uses computers to decode those signals and transform them into action. So far, BCI research efforts have only been able to decode imagined actions. The ability to decode imagined speech will make mentally communicating with computers far easier. Leuthardt says the technology will better connect humans and machines, and will give the disabled unprecedented access to the world. Leuthardt and Washington University biological engineer Daniel Moran have developed video games that can be played with the mind. Players control the game by imagining an action. For example, imagining moving the left hand may mean moving left, while imagining moving the tongue may create upward movement. The system has only been tested on a few people because the sensors used require brain surgery. So far, children with epilepsy have been given the chance to participate because they already have similar equipment surgically implanted to locate electric signals in the brain.

Cars Driving Themselves

University of New Brunswick researchers led by professor Howard Li are developing cars capable of driving themselves. Li says one of the first steps is to take detailed pictures of sharp turns, deer, pedestrians, and other obstacles and program those images into a simulator so the system learns what objects to avoid. He says the biggest challenge is developing the right algorithms to allow thousands of smart cars to be compatible on the road and avoid collisions with each other. "We obviously can't use thousands of vehicles to test artificial intelligence compatibility," he says. "We'll use computer simulations to test it and write computer simulations of multiple cars working together." Li says the technology is likely decades away from being used in commercial cars. However, he says there will be breakthroughs made as part of the process that could lead to sensors that prevent accidents by warning drivers of potential dangers. The technology also could be used to save lives in Afghanistan by helping troops avoid hazards. Li says artificial intelligence technology could be used to automate vehicles for tasks such as snow removal, city transit, assembly lines, and farming. "The robotics market is growing 40 percent every year," he says. "This is a field that's going to keep growing and evolving, and one day it will be as common for every family as owning a PC is today."

Schools and Video Games

Teachers are increasingly incorporating video games, virtual reality, and simulations to improve education. Business and science classes are starting to use sophisticated software that allows students to test out potential careers, practice skills, or explore history through simulated adventures in national parks, ancient cities, or outer space. The military and medical schools, which use games and simulations to train new personnel, are helping to boost the use of video games in classrooms. Advocates argue that games can teach vital skills such as teamwork, decision-making, and digital literacy. Games also can challenge students just enough to keep them interested in reaching the next level. "There is a revolution in the understanding of the educational community that video games have a lot of what we need," says Jan Plass, co-director of the Games for Learning Institute at New York University. Game designers are replacing the violence in video games with equations and educational challenges. For example, Dimension M is a suite of math games that require players to learn about functions and solve equations to stop a biodigital virus from taking over the world. The Federation of American Scientists is promoting games as a way of inspiring new scientists, and has developed two games in which players fight bacterial invaders in a blood vessel. A recent revision to the Higher Education Act authorized the creation of a research center for assessing and developing educational technologies such as simulations and video games.

Educational Technology

University of Arizona (UA) scientists have received a $300,000 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant to develop artificial intelligence and education technology that mirrors the consumer tracking algorithms used by sites such as Amazon and iTunes. The researchers, led by UA professor Paul R. Cohen, want to maximize a tutoring system model by using data on learners to improve the feedback provided by intelligent tutoring systems. "Teaching people means making a sequence of dependent decisions," Cohen says. "We're trying to optimize the value of each decision by reasoning algorithmically about how it sets up the student for future learning opportunities." The researchers are developing a program that would be capable of already knowing what a student knows and matching that knowledge with comparable students before suggesting specific texts, exams, videos, educational games, demonstrations, and other Web-based educational tools. The technology would be able to direct students to the best possible learning experience for each student, refining each student's curriculum as it learns more about learners in general. Preliminary findings from a pilot project suggest that students who used the model learned more quickly and were able to retain information better, and that the program improved as more students participated.