Class Projects

Homework Exchange Project

Our team will build a hyper-linked homework discussion space on the WWW. This information space will accomodate posting of new homework assignments by the instructor, posting (and revising) of completed homework by students, posting of threaded comments about specific student homeworks, and threaded discussion about class issues in general. The goals of using such a system for our class include providing a means for peer-to-peer learning, implementing a group memory, and evaluating how well the system meets the M3 model of the WWW.

Integrating the Virtual and Physical to Promote Life-Long Learning (LLL)

Integrate computational and physical models within a supportive and collaborative environment to promote life-long learning. Currently we are exploring two possible design domains. described below.

1) Designing Shopping Malls

This system provides a simulation environment for designing a shopping mall. As designers change store arrangements, it simulates economical status and transitions of individual stores and the mall as a whole. It also simulates changing satisfactions of customers of the mall. There are different stakeholders in the simulation that are shop managers running different businesses, customers having different purposes and money to spend. The purpose of the simulation is finding a mall design that maximizes satisfaction of the different stakeholders.

2) Designing Predator Prey Relationships

This environment presents a socially-relevant and hotly-debated issue to middle school children. In particular, children are presented with the question: should wolves be reintroduced into Rocky Mountain National Park? Their task is to create a model that justifies their solution to this problem. Within this model there are several issues that students will have to content with. First, what is the effects of introducing a predator into a system where prey is widely available (over population of deer for example)? Second, who or what is the prey if predators are introduced (in addition to the deer population, are cattle going to be killed, are children and adults going to become prey too, etc.) The students must establish a relationship between hunger and prey. For example, if the wolves have ample food through the available dees, will cattle and children be safe? Third, what are the social impacts of such desicions? For example, who is in favor of the reintroducing the wolves and who is opposed to their reintroduction.

Support for Software Evolution

We wish to design a system that provides support for both the sharing and evolution of software artifacts. For our project we will design a computational system to provide communities of software designers with specific support for software evolution. This system will have two major components. The first component is a forum for sharing their computational artifacts. We will try to augment the WebNet component architecture and the Agentsheets Behavior Exchange (Agentshare) to provide the necessary environment for sharing computational artifacts. This support will facilitate the seeding of the dynamic system. The second component is a set of tools that allow individuals to modify this initial creation. By providing support for reorganization, commenting, and history of artifacts, we hope to create an environment that not only supports evolution, but that also captures useful rationale and history during the evolution and reseeding process. We hope that contextualized computational support for evolving software artifacts will go beyond traditional systems and provide assistance in all phases in the software and design development.