Group #10
- Khalid Akash: Coding, Git
- Sagar Phanda: Java, Project Management
- Yiwen Tao: Java, Database
- Joseph Cella: C++, Java,
- Dhruvik Patel: Java, C
- Vikas Khan: C++
In a world where technology is so prevalent and easily accessible, many students are using it to supplement learning from lectures. Many students would greatly benefit from the ability to observe the workings and functions of a laboratory settings on their own time, however, it is difficult to provide labs for large numbers of students across a wide variety of topics due to the sheer number of students, and logistical or financial restrictions of the schools or universities. Even in scenarios where students do get experience in an actual lab, professors must manually grade and track each student’s results and lab reports, which can be tedious and time consuming. Both students and instructors would greatly benefit from a resource that would allow for a laboratory experience that would enhance what they learned in class, but would also allow for instructors to track the progress of large numbers of student easily.
The best way to solve this would be to have virtual sessions where students can simulate labs on their own computers. These sessions can accurately test the materials needed for the lab, such as the type of vials and beakers needed, and the procedures involved in the lab. Procedures would give immediate feedback to the student based on whether they were right or wrong to maximize learning during the simulation. Feedbacks can come in the form of learning tutorials, or basic articles that teach about the subject being taught. Based on the student’s performance, we will assign grades to them at the end of each lab which will be converted to a Markup Language file that can be parsed by any grading system. Professors or Teaching Assistants can also come in and help students with a live messaging system that allows interactivity between students and instructors. Quizzes will be given pre and post lab simulation to ensure the student learned the knowledge presented to them. Professors will have access to a database presentation of all the student’s performances; their weaknesses and strengths.
To achieve our goal of completing the project by the deadline, we have made a plan that we will follow. The components of the software we are developing is the following, with delivery estimates. A further explanation of these is found below.
The main challenge of this project will be obtaining and inserting images, and getting those images to interact with the “environment” around them as students work on their labs. The first and most important step will be to fully comprehend how to construct this program. This will require a good amount of research from all team members. Subgroups will likely be created in order to break up the work for this task. This will most likely take the most time of anything in the project. Once the lab portion is completed, the rest of details can be built off of that. These details, such as creating pre and post tests, grading, uploading to sakai, statistics, and instant feedback are simpler tasks that will not take as long, and therefore can be divided up and distributed to the subgroups for completion.
In our team, we have 6 members. Each member has a different strength, which will help with division of work and proper completion. As can be seen in the chart below, each team member has a specific skill set that will be crucial to delivering this project to the customer at the proper time frame.
| Name | Expertise |
|---|---|
| Sagar Phanda | Java, PM, Documentation |
| Khalid Akash | Java, C, Python, Android, Git |
| Joseph Cella | Research, Writing Skills, C++ |
| Dhruvik Patel | Java, C, Documentation |
| Vikas Khan | C++, Research, Design |
| Yiwen Tao | Java, VHDL, Hardware Design |
The expected completion date of this project is April 30, with specification and design reports being completed by February 18 and March 11, respectively. Internal deadlines will also be made and tasks will be assigned to each team member / mini-groups within the team to ensure that the overall project completion date is met. As the project progresses, we will be constantly updating the customer with any information deemed fit and any notice of delays / progression. Once the entire project is completed, we will be doing some beta testing to ensure that it meets the customer’s expectation. To measure the success of our customer’s system, we will have a sample group to test out the functionalities of our simulations. This sample group will be given a demo lab to complete and will be told to report any feedback they have once they finish the lab. If any bugs are found, they will be patched in an update and another sample group will assist with beta-testing. Once all the bugs are worked out, the final version [with all bugs patched] will be presented to the customer.