Summer Project Updates

When school lets out for summer,  the pace quickens at Computing and Information Services. The academic break means time to work on projects that may otherwise disrupt the academic schedule. It also means we have our summer interns to work closely with us on projects and tasks. Here’s a brief look into some of the assignments our team is working on.

Introduction to Engineering Design and Manufacturing Communication Platform

CIS interns have been working to improve the feedback systems used in Introduction to Engineering Design and Manufacturing, often known as E4. Throughout the semester, student teams produce prototypes that solve professor-curated problems, and formative feedback is critical to this process. The professors want to create easy avenues for students to give feedback to their teammates weekly and at the end of the semester so the professors can understand the team’s working environment and so the students see areas for improvement. The intern team is using Google App Maker (available to the all members of the HMC community through our G Suite for Education) to build an administrative hub that will allow professors to send out the feedback surveys, collect the data, and manage the entire process from one place, improving the ease of students rapidly adapting projects and professors changing the class in light of feedback.

Sakai Upgrade Testing

Each summer, the IT staff across The Claremont Colleges set out to upgrade the consortium’s instance of the Sakai Learning Management System. Guided by the Sakai Administration Team based out of Pomona College (the lead college for Sakai), each college thoroughly tests the proposed version of Sakai to make sure that every tool used by faculty at the Colleges works properly. This year, our summer interns and the Academic and Research Computing Services team have been testing integral features such as Lessons and Forums as well as new ones like iClicker and MediaSite Lecture Capture integration on each supported platform (Windows and  Mac OS) and browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer) to make sure you have the best experience come fall semester.

Printing Upgrades

Mudd students love their unlimited free printing, but they don’t necessarily enjoy long waits and occasional missing letters. Reliability upgrades on both the software side (updated versions of our printing software) and hardware side (a new printer) mean that when our students come back in the fall, their printers will be faster, more reliable, and more accurate. Stay tuned for even more exciting news on printing!

Mudders Mentoring Mudders (M3) Website Migration

Mudders Mentoring Mudders (M3) is a program that allows for HMC staff, faculty and alumni to mentor current students. The Wikispaces platform, which is shutting down, hosted the program’s website (which features mentor profiles and mentee applications), so program director and Professor of Mathematics Darryl Yong ‘96 worked with the CIS team to help find a new platform for the site and migrate all of its content. The CIS intern team has worked hard to migrate the site and all of its content to its current home, Google Sites.