ARCS Projects

The Academic and Research Computing team sends out a request for educational technology projects three times a year. Our goal is to work with groups across campus to expand the use of educational technology and instructional design throughout the college.

To submit a potential project request, please email the ARCS team.

For a detailed look at one of our Projects, visit our Project Spotlight

2020

  • Prof. Timothy J. Tsai: ENG208 – Aashita Kesarwani worked with Prof. TJ Tsai in designing the elective course ENG208 that covers the deep learning applications in signal processing by brainstorming the syllabus and course structure, designing three assignments that involved coding neural networks from scratch, setting up autograding with help from student interns, and consulting on multiple aspects of computing packages and environments to be used for this course.
  • CTL Online Learning Course – ARCS worked with the Claremont Colleges Center for Teaching and Learning to develop an online course in Sakai. The course focused on helping faculty pivot from in person classes to online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Orientation 2020 – The ARCS team collaborated with the Division of Student Affairs to design and create a Sakai site for HMC Orientation 2020 since Orientation was not able to be held in person.

2019

  • Vatche Sahakian: Physics – JupyterHub server – Aashita Kesarwani, the Research Computing and Data Science Specialist, installed a JupyterHub server on Prof. Sahakian’s Kepler GPU machine that serves multiple users with a uniform computing environment via a web-based interface. It was set up with Julia kernel and nbgrader for autograding and is used for teaching classes as well as research work.
  • Jessica Wu: CS – Aashita Kesarwani assisted Prof. Jessica Wu by guiding student interns in finding datasets and creating the coding assignments for her course in data science ethics.
  • Matthew Spencer: E80 – ARCS worked with an electrical engineering faculty to create the instructional materials for the 6 labs in his course. The materials created for each lab include a lab prompt, a lab report rubric, a peer review feedback form for lab reports, and an assessment sheet for graders.
  • Julie Medero & Lucas Bang: CS70 – ARCS team helped faculty from the Department of Computer Science create a seamless learning experience for students. Sakai, Gradescope, GitHub Classroom, GitHub, and Docker were integrated into this course. You can read more about this project in the ARCS Projects Spotlight 2019.
  • Lelia Hawkins: Chem 41 – James Sadler and Yi Luo worked with Professor Hawkins to create training material to teach her students how to use the Toonly software to create and edit informative animated videos. Once the material was created they offered a class session to walk the students through how to use the software.

2018

  • Isabel Balseiro: HMC LIT 179X – ARCS helped design the course syllabus, project instructions, assessments, and workshops to integrate Scalar, an open-source scholarly publishing tool that can be used to create media-rich content, into this course. ARCS also taught two workshops on Scalar in class in the Spring and Fall semesters of 2018. Scalar technical support was also provided to faculty and students.
  • Kate Kharitonova: CS121 – ARCS worked with a computer science faculty to create instructional materials such as a course syllabus, Github learning resources, and a student feedback survey for this course.
  • Tableau visualizations of WHAM data – The ARCS scientific computing intern, Chukwudi Oguejiofor, worked with the HMC Teaching and Learning committee to visualize data collected through the Workload and Health at Mudd (WHAM) surveys using Tableau.

2017

  • Julie Medero, Beth Trushowsky, Yekaterina (Kate) Kharitonov: CS70 – ARCS created training materials, FAQs and instructional videos for CS 70 in order to help students who are coming to the course without much experience in using Linux and Github.
  • You can read more about this project in the ARCS Projects Spotlight 2017.
  • F&M: Galileo Redesign – ARCS worked with the Facilities and Maintenance Department to design the audiovisual systems during the renovation of the Galileo Auditoria. This included the video projection, assisted listening, lecture capture, and audio distribution systems.
  • Talithia Williams, Susan Martonosi, Kenji Koza: Math35 – ARCS worked closely with the faculty to develop course content, course assignments, and user guides to support the transition from using Minitab to R, an open source statistics package, for Math 35.

2016

  • Satyan Devadoss: Website for student projects in computational geometry
  • Lelia Hawkins & Rachel Levy: Developing an R package for atmospheric sample data analysis and visualization

2015

  • Albert Dato: Interactive Simulation – Using a game engine, create an interactive experience for students to