Honours student success in IT research competition

SIM celebrates the recent success of their Honours students who competed in the annual IITP Student Research Contest.

14 December 2012

The Wellington branch of the Institute of IT Professionals recently held their annual student research competition, where honours students from the Schools of Information Management, and Engineering and Computer Science presented their research projects to an audience of IT professionals, academics, and fellow students.

A panel of four judges, including Professor Nicolas Romano from the School of Information Management, represented industry and academia. The School is very proud of its three Honours students who presented their work, Nathan Hopkins, Lana Traut and Aaron Young.

Nathan was selected as the overall winner, receiving an award of $300.  Nathan’s project was Life On The Edge: An Investigation of a 21st Century School Bag (see below).  Congratulations to Nathan and his supervisor Dr Allan Sylvester.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an emerging phenomenon in business orientated organisations, and also, increasingly, in school classrooms. Despite becoming widespread, factors that affect students’ use of BYOD are not well understood. The purpose of this research was to determine those factors that affect secondary school students’ use of BYOD. We used a modified version of Taylor and Todd’s (1995) decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to evaluate antecedents to behavioural intention to BYOD. We received 386 responses from 9 New Zealand secondary schools. The results show that students’ behavioural intention to use their own device is substantially influenced by their attitude and moderately influenced by their subjective norms and perceived behavioural control.