The 2005 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Engineering

Title:
Optimization Methods for Propeller Design

Faculty Client:
Spyros Kinnas, kinnas@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Alex Games
Richard Meth

Project Description:
The professor, his associates, and his graduate students developed sophisticated computational models for the analysis and design of propellers, helping students understand principles of propeller design and apply them to their term projects in ocean engineering. This project created the 3D java applet for visualizing the propeller designs.

Title:
Development of a Graduate Web-Based Course in Heat and Mass Transfer: Graphics Production Continuation

Faculty Client:
Ofodike Ezekoye, dezekoye@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Madduri Raghunath

Project Description:
For UT Austin’s distance learning graduate program for nuclear and radiation engineering, delivering Web-based stringent mathematical content is a daunting task requiring the integration of complex equations, graphical illustrations, and animations. The goal for this project was to develop the means to convey such content to distance learners and on-campus students, to develop their technical understanding through animation, simulation, and graphical illustration, by adapting content from class lecture notes from the course in heat and mass transfer for PowerPoint. The ~FAST Tex student also collaborated with the Web designer in the nuclear and radiation engineering program to incorporate photographic images and graphics within the course notes.

Title:
Development of a Revised Web-Based Health Physics Course

Faculty Client:
Sheldon Landsberger, s.landsberger@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Michael Kantor
Mithun Pal

Project Description:
To reflect advances in health physics and nuclear medicine, a 17-year-old multi-disciplinary course required updating to the level of other courses, using images, videos, and animations to give students a much clearer understanding of the interactions of radiation at the atomic and sub-atomic levels, the causes of radiation damage, cancer therapy with nuclear medicine, and naturally occurring radioactive materials in the environment. Project participants reformatted PowerPoint presentations to integrate static images and Flash animation into Web-based lectures delivered through Blackboard.

Title:
Non-Linear PowerPoint to Aid Learning of Probability, Random Processes, and Statistics

Faculty Client:
Mia Markey, mia.markey@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Seth Hays

Project Description:
To develop a set of interconnected, non-linear PowerPoint presentations to encourage flexible lecturing responsive to students’ needs to see the connections between topics through a learner-driven resource for self-study and review, the student developer created new content and used hypertext features of PowerPoint to make connections between course topics linked to external information sources. This was a collaborative project with the College of Engineering’s Faculty Innovation Center.