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Pamela Connors, Communication Studies
We are interested in developing software for an assessment tool for one of our Comm Studies basic
courses: Public Discourse. Martin Lang, Sarah Wolter, and I would be the clients (I could serve as the
main point of contact).
I think ideally we'd be looking for a web-based program to serve as a rubric for both students and
instructors to be able to use it to evaluate and provide feedback on student presentations. I've attached
what I currently use, a form with dropdown boxes in MS Excel. We actually will be revising these
categories, so there's a fair amount that would change, but the basic idea would be to be able to quickly
assess certain components of a person's speech using a scale, with two additional functions: 1) inserting
pre-written comments that help guide the speaker to improve (the types of guidance that is commonly
repeated from student to student) and 2) typing free-form comments that would be specific to the
student's particular speech. We would want the flexibility to edit the rubric categories and edit the precanned comments.
Kate Knutson, Political Science
The Political Science department has a project for your class. We have been trying for several years to
find a way to digitally archive our senior theses in a way that is searchable and password protected. We
have contacted GTS about this project several times and they say they can't do it/don't have time. This
is definitely a priority for our department and so we would appreciate having a student group work on
the project. If this is something you think would be appropriate for your class, I'd be happy to provide
more detailed information. I can also answer any questions you might have before making a decision.
I think that most of our files are saved as PDFs. We have them on a memory stick organized by semester
but would like them to be accessible and searchable by current students. As long as there is some sort
of password protection, I don't think a Cloud-based system would be a problem. (Note from Hvidsten –
to add search capability the theses will need to be stored along with textual abstracts)
Josh Brown, Philosphy
What I'm looking for is an automated natural deduction proof checker. The rough idea is this: each line
in a proof consists of (1) a scope, (2) a sentence, and (3) a justification. There are then rules that are
used to determine whether or not a line is well-formed; a proof is well-formed just in case every line is
well-formed. The potentially complicated part is likely to be a parser for the sentences. The simplest
version of what I'd like is for students to be able to enter a proof, and for the proof checker to identify
any ill-formed lines. There's also some advanced functionality that could be included if that proves to be
too easy!
The syntax is very tight--the languages are the language of sentential logic and the language of first
order predicate logic. I can provide a precise recursive syntax for each. (I'd actually be happy to have
the program even for just sentential logic.)
Dwight Stoll, Chemistry
This is a project to create a new way to visualize chemical data for High Performance Liquid
Chromatography. The data is currently visualized in tabular form on a PHP-based web site
(http://www.hplccolumns.org/) that can be searched. The project would involve learning PHP
programming with visualization using the HTML5 canvas element.