The 2005 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Natural Sciences

Title:
Bio-DOC: Biology Digital Online Content

Faculty Client:
K. Sata Sathasivan, sata@mail.utexas.edu
Daniel Bolnick, danbolnick@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Sumit Srivastava
Anthony Maggio
Sivaramakrishnan Radhakrishnan

Project Description:
This project resulted in material for phase I of Bio-DOC, a clearinghouse for quality, rich-media resources for teaching and learning for the biological sciences, initially for introductory level courses at UT Austin. This resource features more than 400 student-rated animations, videos, and interactive exercises as well as direct links to the source of the materials.

Title:
Online Student Peer-Evaluation and Feedback

Faculty Client:
Dee Silverthorn, silverthorn@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Rohit Chawla

Project Description:
Peer evaluations can bring accountability and self-reflection to collaborative learning situations if students make constructive requests of their partners and use feedback to improve their future contributions. To achieve this ideal, students must be able to provide rationales for their numerical evaluations of their team-mates, attaching requests and appreciations that show teammates how they come across to others.

Project participants produced an online system for students to use to provide feedback to their team members for various projects throughout the semester, with both individual ratings and comparisons to the class average.

Title:
EON: A Distributed Computing System to Extend the Time Scale of Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Faculty Client:
Graeme Henkelman, henkelman@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Ravi Rajan

Project Description:
The EON distributed computing system increases the time scale of molecular dynamics simulations. A standard dynamics simulation, using traditional algorithms on the fastest computers, is limited to a microsecond or one millionth of a second. But many important chemical reactions and dynamical processes in materials science occur on a time scale of seconds or minutes. EON is able to provide these long time scales using a statistical approach. The result of this project for the first phase is a Web page that displays the variety of current usage statistics data of the distributed computing system based at UT Austin.

Title:
Simulations for Classical Dynamics

Faculty Client:
Alejandro Lozanne, lozanne@physics.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Lev Shvarts

Project Description:
Because classical dynamics is always taught by deriving equations and, in a few cases, showing simple solutions in static graphs and drawings, the capability to show an object in motion in real time significantly improves understanding. Similarly, seeing the formation of graphs in real time is much better than seeing the final, static product. This project required redeveloping existing programs in BASIC into Java applets.

Title:
Nutrition in Motion

Faculty Client:
Monica Meadows, MonicaRD@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Will Schexnayder

Project Description:
Project participants produced up-to-date Flash animations for key concepts in introductory nutrition, for use by instructors during lectures and by students on their own, covering topics such as energy metabolism, lipoprotein routes, protein synthesis, and the Cori cycle.

Title:
SmartBytes: An Interactive Multimedia Program for Teaching Nutrient Composition Of Food

Faculty Client:
Monica Meadows, MonicaRD@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Chongxiang Wang

Project Description:
SmartBytes, an interactive multimedia program about the nutrient composition of food, enhances traditional curricula and leads to improved cognition, self-efficacy, and food-related behavior for introductory and advanced level nutrition students. Project participants assisted in updating content based on current nutritional research and in bringing SmartBytes online.