The Current Group
Spring 2008
Spring 2008
Team Members
- Leah Baldwin, 3rd Year Biomedical Engineering
- Keith Campbell, 4th Year Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Rocio Diaz, 3rd Year Chemistry
- Yewon Gim, 4th Year Physics
- Angela Pak, 3rd Year Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics
- Anthony Parrillo, 4th Year Applied Mathematics
- Shane Steward, 4th Year Computer Science
- Joshua Tate, 3rd Year Applied Mathematics
- Patrick Ten Eyck, 2nd Year Applied Mathematics
- Aimee Totleben, 3rd Year Applied Mathematics
Faculty Advisors
- Dr. Greg Fasshauer, Applied Mathematics
- Dr. Michael Pelsmajer, Applied Mathematics
The Problem
- Many american students in middle and high schools regularly score worse than any other nations on math and science standardized tests.
- Factors that contribute to this are the lack of available math and science resources that could help students, parents and teachers.
- As a concequence of this, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students regularly struggle to complete science fair projects successfully.
- Web standards not perfect and no direction as to what the previous team did.
Goals for this Semester
- Update current science fair project bank and create data analysis and safety guides
- Create more contacts with different people who can help develop IPRO 330
- Revamp the website so that it would be more appealing to students, and easier to use for future groups
Team Organization
We broke into three teams:
- Project/Guides
- Communication
- Infrastructure
Accomplishments
- Restructured and reformatted Science Fair Website
- Renovated data analysis guides to be more comprehensible by CPS teachers, students, and parents
- Visited high schools and presented our website and quiz to students and teachers
- Our IPRO was able to present our project to 50+ teachers involved in IIT High School Transformation Project and was very successful at obtaining more contacts for the coming semester.
- Created a student friendly Safety Hazards Guide
- Designed a Quiz to help students choose a science fair topic
- Added 10+ projects to our current science fair project bank, which ranged from easy to challenging
- Distributed IPRO 330 brochures and information to CPS city-wide science fair
- Univesity of Chicago collaboration for future goals
- Separated the coding into two components: design and content
- Changed the design of the website and made the usability easier by adding more internal links
- Converted all code for website to standard xhtml format. See our Web Standards Guide and the Example Web Document for a detailed description of how we did this
- Created a Subversion Tutorial for future IPRO groups to see how work was done this semester so that group will be able to keep adding to the website easily
Future Plans
- Maintain and increase communication with CPS science teachers and science coordinators with the aim to provide our support for CPS science
- Add more interactive guides so that students learn through practice
- Future members of IPRO 330 will expand and improve on already posted projects and presentation guides, as well as add projects of their own.
- The website will also need to be expanded and improved upon with increased content, and more interactive programs, based on further research and feedback from current Chicago Public Schools.