Student Lab Notebook
My senior design project is an application that allows students to complete science labs using electronic resources instead of a paper lab notebook. A common issue in today’s science classes is that many people find science labs to be the only class where they are required to maintain a notebook instead of using their laptop. This leads to low retention of lab materials as well a low ability to collaborate among the class or even among lab partners. There is also a large amount of busy work created by filling out paper lab manuals such as the calculation of averages and other statistics about the data being collected. Finally, the students participating in the lab have no idea how their data compares to the data being collected by other students who have completed the lab ahead of them. This leads to guess work and inevitably the fudging of data after the fact. My solution to this problem is the creation of an interactive lab where students can fill in content in collaboration with other students. My application allows for the creation and completion of three types of content. Question/Answer modules are modules where the teacher provides a prompt and students complete their own answers in essay format. Chart Modules work with a teacher providing instructions for an experiment that involves taking numerical data in an organized format. Students then fill out the corresponding charts. Chart Modules include aggregated data services for the teachers an students alike by providing an average of student submissions as well as a standard deviation between all students answers. This allows students and teachers to see how the class is doing on the module as well as allowing the students to judge how accurate their solution is. Lastly, my application contains multiple choice modules. Teachers create the content by assigning a series of multiple choice questions along with four potential answers for each question. Students complete this module through the application. Additionally, teachers are able to access each student’s specific grade, the average grade for the entire class, as well as visual data that displays the average grade of the class on each individual question. Overall, this application is useful because it allows for increased accessibility of data for both students and teachers. Students are able to gauge their data compared to other students data and enhance the accuracy of their work. Teachers are able to get an instant gauge on class completion of course content, which allows them to correct problems in comprehension before they get out of hand.
Bio:
I am currently a senior at the George Washington University majoring in Computer Science with a concentration in Software Engineering and Application Development. I grew up in Killington Vermont and my pastimes include skiing, golfing, and shooting sports. Technically, I have taken an interest to wrangling data sets and automating otherwise mundane processes. I spent this past summer working as a software development intern for a software company in the enterprise content management industry. We worked with hospitals to develop data migration tools for an ever increasing number of electronic health records (EHRs). I am currently finishing up an internship at Linked Senior, which is a healthcare oriented tech startup which works in the senior care and assisted living space. After graduation, I will be moving to Massachusetts to work for IBM in their services department. I will be working on team involved in integrating new acquisitions with IBM solutions.
Project Video: