The 2006 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Natural Sciences

Title:
PBI Course Enhancements

Faculty Client:
Gail Dickinson, dickinson@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Alicia Cho

Project Description:
This project enhanced the current course Web site with new videos, webcasts, tutorials, and downloadable files. The goal of this project was to enable students to work independently on background materials so class meeting time is focused on group work and interaction with the instructor.

Title:
EON: Distributed Computing System Phase II

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

Student Developer:
Eric Capps

Project Description:
In the first phase of this project, a ~FAST Tex student helped to develop a statistics system to keep track of the computational work done by contributors to the EON project. Now, the results are displayed in real time, to contributors, researchers, and students of the CH368/382J computational chemistry course. The EON project uses distributed computing to simulate atomic dynamics over long time scales. The visualizer is a Java applet, embedded in a Web page, which is able to display the calculated dynamics as a movie. Emphasis was placed on 3-D visualization of atomic positions, as well as other chemical information such as the energy, bonding geometry, and the simulation time scale.

Title:
Bio-DOC: Phases I.5, II, and III

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

Student Developers:
Sumit Srivastava
Gerrit Van Der Ende
Amal Bannerjee

Project Description:
Bio-DOC is a clearinghouse for quality, rich-media resources for teaching and learning for the biological sciences, initially for introductory level courses at UT Austin. This phase of the project resulted in students locating several hundred additional high-quality content items and the integration with the LAITS Digital Archive SErvices site (DASE): http://dase.laits.utexas.edu

Title:
Online Student Peer-Evaluation and Feedback:  Phase 2

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

Student Developer:
Ravishankar Narayan

Project Description:
Peer evaluations can bring opportunities for both accountability and self-reflection to collaborative learning situations. Ideally, students use peer evaluations to make constructive requests of their partners and use the feedback they receive from their partners to improve their own future contributions. This second phase of the project modified the system developed last season by ~FAST Tex. Specifically, "delete" functionality was added so that Dr. Silverthorn can remove past evaluations and tests.  An "import" function was also added so that Dr. Silverthorn can upload roster spreadsheets of students.