Due, Project Plan: April 17
Due, Completed Project: May 2 and May 4
Your final assignment for the term is to research and reflect on the role of computing in a time of crisis. You can choose to either work alone or in teams of up to 3 people for this assignment. (Note: After you submit your project plan, I may assign you to work as part of a team.) The assignment can take one of three forms:
- A short essay. Find three or more articles that describe or illustrate a role that computing has played in the world’s handling of the Corona Virus outbreak. Write a short (500 word) essay summarizing what you learned. Examples might include: computing for data visualization or modeling, the use of location data to make sense of the outbreak, or computing in healthcare.
- A personal reflection or interview. Write a short (500 word) essay about your own experience of technology and its relationship to the crisis. If you choose this option, you should have some significant experience to reflect on (ie: you work in IT at a hospital). Or, interview someone about their direct experience of technology and the crisis and write about your interview.
- A creative project. Create a small piece of technology to explore your own understanding or experience of the crisis. For example: a data visualization built from publicly available information, a computational model of disease transmission, an expressive interactive artwork, or a prototype of computationally controlled hardware (ie: ventilator technology). Useful repositories of data about the corona virus: https://covidtracking.com/ and https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-county-data-us.html. Useful tools for quickly building and publishing javascript programs: https://p5js.org/ and https://www.openprocessing.org/.
Project Plan, Due April 17 (both classes)
Create a post on this site with your project plan. Add it to the Student Work category. Plan should include a short description of the project along with: group members (if applicable), links to articles (if you are choosing option 1), information about interview subject or topic (if you are choosing option 2), more detailed description of project (if you are choosing option 3).
Final Project, Due May 2 and May 4 (two days before class)
If you choose option 1 or 2, you should post your essay to this site. If you choose option 3, you should create a post on this site that describes or documents the technology you have developed and, if applicable, directs viewers to a place where they can experience the technology you have developed. Add posts to the Student Work category.
I will review your projects and ask a subset of you to describe (and if possible present) your projects to the class during our final class meetings on Monday May 4th and Wednesday May 6th.
Grading
- 25 points: quality of project plan
- 25 points: project fulfills all listed requirements
- 50 points: quality of project execution