ARCS Summer Projects 2022

The ARCS team has had a busy summer with five summer projects proposed by faculty. This is the most we’ve had since the pandemic started, and we were very happy to have so many interesting and varied projects to work on with faculty.

ARCS worked with Profs. Kathy van Heuvelen and Karl Haushalter to research and test several software platforms for Chemistry 42. The faculty were looking for a single platform that would increase communication and engagement in the lecture class. They wanted a platform that would allow them to ask questions, polls, and similar activities that students could respond to without requiring a device like the iClicker. They also wanted students to be able to ask anonymous questions during the lecture. After some research, the team selected two platforms for testing: Acadly and Poll Everywhere. While Acadly had all of the features we were looking for, the interface was very disappointing. Poll Everywhere had some limitations, but was very easy to use. The low cost for an Instructor’s license was also a plus. The instructors will be trying it out in the Fall in Chemistry 42 and we look forward to hearing how it goes and to getting student feedback. Look for a Bite of Learning presentation in the Spring!

Profs. Matina Donaldson-Matasci and Steve Adolph requested assistance with Biology 46 (Introduction to Biology). For this project they were primarily looking for help with evaluating and testing the R Studio Cloud platform and determining if it would be a good fit for the types of assignments they wanted to use. Our Data Scientist, Dr. Aashita Kesarwani, worked with them to decide on the best license model for the software platform, design a workflow for students, and create documentation.

Aashita is helping Prof. Jamie Haddock on her Math 189AD course (Mathematical Data Science & Topic Modeling) with revising the course assignments by converting them from Matlab into Python in Google Colab. She is helping with choosing the Python packages and figuring out the best way for students to use the required data sets in Colab. Part of the project also involved integrating Colab to use with Google Classroom for teaching the course. Yi also reviewed the self-grading rubrics that Jamie used.

Prof. Xanda Schofield and Surani Gunasena approached the ARCS team for help with redesigning the CS 121 course for Spring 2023. The team is working with them on a variety of tasks. Aashita helped set up Github pages using Jupyter notebooks and created a machine learning project as an example for students. Aashita also helped with using Google Colab for version control and code review using the Comments feature. James Sadler, our Senior Instructional Technologist, recommended Google Tables as a Kanban platform for the students to learn project management techniques. Elizabeth Hodas recommended best practices for using the peer review feature in Sakai. And Dr. Yi Luo, our Senior Instructional Designer, researched survey questions for professional development-oriented courses. She also began drafting the course schedule using the Sakai Lessons tool.

Prof. Alberto Soto, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Interdisciplinary Computation (PIC) within the Engineering department, reached out to us for help with designing a new course which he will be teaching next year. The course will focus on the biomechanics of animal locomotion and sensory systems. Yi has been meeting with him to discuss learning outcomes and assessments, while Aashita is working with him on converting assignments from R into Python in Google Colab, as well as discussing what the assignment workflow would look like.

If you have a project in mind that you’d like to work on with the ARCS team please feel free to contact us by emailing arcs-l@g.hmc.edu.