The 2004 ~FAST Tex projects
Red McCombs School of Business

Title:
Does a Firm's Type of Product Costing System Affect a Product's Competitive Market Price? An Automation of The Price-Determination Process in a Managerial Accounting Experiential Learning Experience

Faculty Client:
Dr. Shane Dikolli, shane.dikolli@mccombs.utexas.edu

Student Developer(s):
Amiya Gupta

Project Description:
This project gives business students the simulated experience of pricing products in a specified market and then getting instant profit/loss feedback. Acting as their own “firm”, student groups develop private information about their company’s production costs in activities before class starts. Then during class, each group works to set a price for their products (in this case, hiking boots). Students submit their prices via a web site that contains demand and profit functions which are interrelated between firms, thereby simulating market feedback. After five rounds, students have experienced the effect of idiosyncratic product costing systems upon the competitive market place.

Title:
Inexhaustible Dynamically Generated Study Questions and Classroom Interaction for Basic Statistics Courses

Faculty Client:
Dr. Thomas Sager, TomSager@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer(s):
Yongshin Yu

Project Description:
This project provides basic statistics students with a (virtually) inexhaustible supply of dynamically generated homework and drill questions. For example: “JOE SMITH runs a LAUNDRY. His FIVE most recent customers brought him 3, 1, 6, 2, 6 SHIRTS, respectively, to be CLEANED. What is the MEAN number of SHIRTS?” in which the numbers and capitalized words are chosen randomly.
The student types in an answer and the scoring program judges whether the answer is close enough to be counted correct. The student gets immediate feedback and can not continue to the next topic until a given skill level has been achieved.
Because each student has a different homework set, plagiarizing is nearly impossible and students have a review tool that does not grow stale.