We have observed that MIT undergraduates across dorms feel that the housing assignment process, particularly for returning students, is unnecessarily slow, manual, and prone to mistakes.
Lounge, speeds up and automates the housing reassignment process. In particular, Lounge has:
Digitized floor plans and rooms for better representation, display, and accessibility.
Zero-step log-in system (simply click on a dorm building) that uses certificates to directs users directly to their floor.
Allows users to search easily through rooms, and users
Supporting various housing assignment methods (pure lottery, points, tiers), allowing to quick adoption by different housing committees
Efficient way to accept rooming preferences/assignments from users, including options for squatting, and designating roommates to choose rooms for both/multiple partners
Synchronous lottery system that allows multiple users to select rooms at the same time, to speed up lottery process
Intuitive interface that distinguishes between admins and residents, allowing only the former to start lotteries, add residents, and set building information.
Flexible interface based on residences, which can be dorms or individual floors, administered by the appropriate housing chairs
Convenient .csv-format export feature that will allow information to be stored and manipulated offline.
Decentralized approach that allowing appropriate “super-admins” to quickly add new buildings, floors, and rooms
Clear instructions and tips where appropriate to guide users quickly through the web app.
Video: Lounge
Team: Abubakar Abid ’15, Abdulrahman Alfozan ’15, Aziz Alghunaim ’15
Recording video is expensive. You have to buy costly equipment, hire a cameraman to operate it, and then waste hours editing. And for universities that want to record video lectures for their students (or for initiatives like OCW, EdX)… it’s neither cost effective, nor scalable. That’s why – despite the high demand for lecture videos – only 2% of MIT OCW videos have lecture videos attached to them.
Differentiating factors? There has been a lot of work in lecture video editing/recording, but much of it has focused on emulating the cameraman. EduCase takes a different approach.
Puts students first: A single cameraman can never capture the dynamic nature of a lecture. Therefore, EduCase has multiple cameras so that the entire scene can be captured (not just a small subset.) During a lecture, students are multitasking. They may be taking notes/referring to a previous board while listening to the professor lecture about the next topic. A cameraman/single-camera system makes this multi-tasking impossible — no good way to determine what the student actually wants to look at. Furthermore, the use of the Kinect enables EduCase to filter out, and “look behind” the professor to see the future board.
Intelligent system: EduCase will automatically focuses on the correct board by using the Microsoft Kinect to track the professor, detect gestures (e.g. writing or pointing to the board gesture,) and do voice recognition.
Scalability: Because EduCase will use multiple smaller cameras to capture the view rather than a single high-quality camera with complex panning/zooming features… the system will be relatively portable and inexpensive. Expandable to non-traditional lecture settings: because there’s a trend away from the traditional lecture-hall format, the system will be designed such that it is easy to add functionality by simply recording new gestures.
To summarize – EduCase is the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to record video lectures – no cameraman, no hours wasted editing. Professor walks, folds open his EduCase, and presses a button for a hassle-free-lecture-recording experience. Impact: We hope that by the end of this project, EduCase will be considered a promising video-lecture recording approach by the OpenCourseWare community, and bring us one step closer to our overarching goal of education for all.
Team: Sara Itani ‘Grad, Fang-Yu Liu ‘Grad, Riccardo Campari ‘Grad, Adin Schmahmann ’13
Have you ever thought, “My education at MIT would be infinitely better or easier if there was just a technology to…?” Or, “Student life at MIT could be dramatically improved with the creative application of technology?” Well, now’s the time to show MIT and your fellow classmates how you might provide solutions to these problems!
Participate in the 2013 iCampus Student Prize competition.
Join the ranks of CourseRoad, Bookxor, Course Picker, NB and Lingt
as winners of the iCampus Prize!
The 2013 competition is a two stage competition awarding up to $15,000 in total prizes. First-round submissions require a working prototype—up to five $1,000 prizes will be awarded to the top competitors. First-round winners are then expected to compete in the final round – which requires a fully functional submission – for a grand prize of up to $10,000.
Important Dates
First Round Submissions Due: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 by 5pm
First Round Contestant Presentation: Monday, March 18, 2013, 2-5pm, Location TBD
First Round Winners Announced: Tent. Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Final Round Presentations and Poster Session: Wednesday, May 1, 2013, 3-6pm, Location TBD
Final Round Submissions Due: Wednesday, May 1, 2013 by 8pm
Final Round Winners Announced: Tent., Friday, May 3, 2013
About the Competition
The iCampus Student Prize recognizes the innovative and creative application of technology that improves the educational and student life experiences at MIT.
The competition builds upon the entrepreneurism and spirit of service exhibited by MIT students to solve the world’s problems by focusing attention of what might be improved closer to home in MIT’s education and student life.
The competition is open to all currently registered MIT undergraduate and graduate students, both individuals and groups. Entries must involve the use of technology to enhance life and learning at MIT, and they must be developed to the point where MIT could adopt them and make them part of our environment.
About the iCampus Prize
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology received an endowment gift of $400,000 from Microsoft Research on behalf of the iCampus research collaboration between Microsoft Research and MIT. iCampus projects demonstrated innovative applications of technology for revolutionary change throughout the Institute’s curriculum. Continuing the spirit of this collaboration, Microsoft Research endowed an award to recognize creative student projects in information technology that improve education, community, and learning. MIT gratefully acknowledges this award, and the spirit of creativity that it represents.
With the iCampus Prize, we work with Edwin Guarin at Microsoft. Edwin’s a technology evangalist with local colleges and universities and is passionate about the Imagine Cup. Over the last couple years we’ve been working to raise the awareness of the Imagine Cup with MIT students, not the least of which because the goals align nicely with the iCampus Prize.
I’d like to bring two of the items he mentions to the attention of potential iCampus Prize submitters…
“Great presentation skills. Each team had just minutes to present its slides and demonstrate its solution. The better teams structured their presentation to match the judging requirements and also rehearsed their speeches to make sure they could deliver them in the allotted time. On the other end of the spectrum, some presenters sat in their chairs when addressing the judges. Entrepreneurs who aren’t polished presenters should go to their local Toastmasters branch or take a course in public speaking at a community college.”
“They got to the point, quickly. Some of the losing teams took too long to set up their solution, focusing on matters that weren’t germane to the judging criteria. Founders need to be ruthless when trimming slide decks to make them as crisp as possible. When you are pitching an investor or potential partner, make sure you hone your own presentations so that they are succinct and on-point. Think Twitter: If you can’t formulate your message in less than 140 characters, work on another message.”
These are two things that you can do to improve your presentations for the iCampus Prize
CourseRoad and Dormbase emerged as the top projects from the final round competition where the five finalists from the first round competition were invited to present a poster and give a short presentation on their project. Judges from MIT and Microsoft evaluated the finalists in three areas: relevance to MIT, potential for impact and design.
2012 Winners
CourseRoad: Grand Prize Winner
CourseRoad builds a user-friendly page where users can map out their classes through their undergraduate careers. CourseRoad presents the user with a vertical timeline of undergraduate semesters, and makes it easy to add, remove, and drag classes between terms. The site then provides a web of prerequisite and corequisite connections between the classes and visually alerts the user to any conflicts. CourseRoad is currently in beta testing. The CourseRoad team consisted of Danny Ben-David, ’15.
The judges were impressed with the progress that Danny made as an one person team, and thought CourseRoad could be a powerful tool for students and their advisors. Danny received a check for $6,000 as grand prize winner. OEIT will be working with Danny through the summer to further develop CourseRoad.
Dormbase: Runner-Up
Dormbase is a web-based system that provides MIT dormitories with the tools and services they need for daily operation. It provides reliable, modern, and user-friendly online services for residents, desk workers, and student administrators. The goal is for Dormbase to provide a consistent user experience across all MIT dormitories. The Dormbaseteam consisted of Alex Chernyakhovsky ’14, Cosmos Darwin ’15, Drew Dennison ’13, Isaac Evans ’13, and Luke O’Malley ’14.
The judges recognized Dormbase the potential Dormbase has to improve student-run dorm operations across the Institute, naming it runner-up for the 2012 iCampus Student Prize competition. The Dormbase team will split the $4,000 cash prize as runner-up.
Dormbase is a web-based system that provides MIT dormitories with the tools and services they need for daily operation. It provides reliable, modern, and user-friendly online services for residents, desk workers, and student administrators. The goal is for Dormbase to provide a consistent user experience across all MIT dormitories. The Dormbaseteam consisted of Alex Chernyakhovsky ’14, Cosmos Darwin ’15, Drew Dennison ’13, Isaac Evans ’13, and Luke O’Malley ’14.
More Information
Further information on the iCampus Prize, as well as announcements of future competitions, can be found at iCampusPrize.mit.edu.
About the iCampus Prize
The iCampus Student Prize recognizes the innovative and creative application of technology that improves living and learning at MIT. The competition builds upon the entrepreneurism and spirit of service exhibited by MIT students to solve the world’s problems by focusing attention of what might be improved closer to home in MIT’s education and student life.
The competition is open to all current MIT undergraduates and graduate students, both individuals and groups. Entries must involve the use of technology to enhance living and learning at MIT, and they must be developed to the point where MIT could adopt them and integrate them into MIT.
The MIT Council for Educational Technology (MITCET) and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) are pleased to announce the winners of the first round of the 2012 iCampus Student Prize competition. Each of the winning projects embody the spirit of the competition—they are developing real solutions to enhance life and learning at MIT.
The 2012 competition is a two-stage competition. In the first round, student teams were asked to create working prototypes, and to define the needs assessment and impact of their projects. In the first round, the winners each receive $1,000. Five of the first round winners have been invited to compete in the final round where they are vying for a grand prize of up to $10,000 and are expected to deliver fully functional projects.
The 2012 iCampus Student Prize first round winners invited to compete for the Final Round competition are:
CasaNexus: CasaNexus will provide an easy to use interface for posting and searching for housing for the short-‐term work opportunities many MIT students pursue to gain insights about fields or industries that they would be interested in working. Team: Connie Chan ’12 and Moji Jimoh ’12.
CourseRoad: CourseRoad builds a user-friendly page where users can map out their classes through their undergraduate careers. CourseRoad presents the user with a vertical timeline of her undergraduate semesters, and makes it easy to add, remove, and drag classes between terms. The site then provides a web of prerequisite and corequisite connections behind the class modules and visually alerts the user to any conflicts. Team: Danny Ben-David ’15.
Dormbase: Dormbase is an open-source dormitory database system that is flexible and expandable. The Dormbase project provides a dorm management system that can evolve overtime to suit the changing needs of the various dorms and their residents. Team: Kojo Acquah ’14, Alex Chernyakhosvky ’14, Cosmos Darwin ’15, Drew Dennison ’13, Chris Dolan ’13, Isaac Evans ’13, Dwyane George ’15, Chris Klingshirn ’15, Luke O’Malley ’14.
STEMid: STEMid (STEM internship database) is a web platform that aggregates STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) internship listings scattered across the internet. Team: Ignatius Chen ’13, Melissa Choi, Roodolph St. Pierre and Marc-Dannie.
Tango: Tango is an academic network that connects students to classmates from the start during class registration. On Tango, you can pick your current classes or future classes you’re interested in and see potential classmates and teammates also considering similar classes. Team: Ray Li ’12, Jessica Lin ’12, Sarah Rumbley ’12.
The Judge’s Choice Winner is:
Nom Nom Now: Never go hungry again! Nom Nom Now allows the user to easily broadcast — and more importantly, find — free food. Team: Chen-Hsiang (Jones) Yu ‘G, David Ogutu ’14, Adisa Kruayatidee ’15.
Details on the winning projects, as well as video of the five-minute “pitches” given by the students can be found at the iCampus Prize website: http://icampusprize.mit.edu/.
The judging panel included Hal Abelson the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Jim Cain from OEIT, Edwin Guarin from Microsoft, Vijay Kumar from OEIT, Brandon Muramatsu from OEIT, Paul Oka from Microsoft Research, Pawan Sinha from Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Oliver Thomas from Information Systems and Technology.
Final Round Competition
Look for the announcements of final presentations in late-April/early-May 2012. The final round competition will include a poster session to allow guests and judges to speak with each group and learn more about the projects. The competition concludes with a lightning round of 5 minute presentations by each group. Judges for the competition will include representatives from Microsoft, MIT faculty and staff, and others.
More Information
For more information on the iCampus Student Prize, and for details on the final round competition, please visit: http://icampusprize.mit.edu/.
About the iCampus Prize
The iCampus Technology Innovation Student Prize recognizes the innovative and creative application of technology that improves the educational and student life experiences at MIT. The competition builds upon the entrepreneurism and spirit of service exhibited by MIT students to solve the world’s problems by focusing attention of what might be improved closer to home in MIT’s education and student life.
The competition is open to all current MIT undergraduates and graduate students, both individuals and groups. Entries must involve the use of technology to enhance life and learning at MIT, and they must be developed to the point where MIT could adopt them and make them part of its environment.
Many MIT students pursue short-‐term work opportunities to gain insights about fields or industries that they would be interested in working. These opportunities are offered all over the country, but in order to participate one needs a place to live. Not every summer internship program can offer housing to its participants. So in order to find housing, students turn to the Internet or the family and friends. There are problems with both approaches. The Internet has a few types of websites that don’t serve the short-‐term temporary housing market very well. There’s Craigslist, which is a free service, but you have to be wary of scams and their website is not designed to support detailed searches; there are sites that are tailored to short term housing listing, but one has to pay to get information to connect with someone and that business model does not seem convenient for students; there are free housing search sites, but they are geared for longer term housing commitments. CasaNexus will address these needs by providing an easy to use interface for posting and searching for housing.
Picking up a copy of the MIT Bulletin it’s easy to immediately discover exactly how complicated planning out class at MIT can be. Sorting between the intricate web of pre- and co-requisites while trying to figure out what the HASS and CI requirements had to do with each other quickly became a daunting task.
CourseRoad builds a user-friendly page where users can map out their classes through their undergraduate careers. CourseRoad presents the user with a vertical timeline of her undergraduate semesters, and makes it easy to add, remove, and drag classes between terms. The site then provides a web of prerequisite and corequisite connections behind the class modules and visually alerts the user to any conflicts. Meanwhile, the left vertical bar provides additional information on selected classes and generates a handy table of the user’s progress through the GIRs. Future additions to CourseRoad will allow users to select degree requirements for particular majors, to save and share their course mappings with others, and to better control course options (such as overriding prerequisites with special permission from an instructor).
Dormbase is an open-source dormitory database system that is flexible and expandable. The Dormbase project provides a dorm management system that can evolve overtime to suit the changing needs of the various dorms and their residents.
Team: Kojo Acquah ’14, Alex Chernyakhosvky ’14, Cosmos Darwin ’15, Drew Dennison ’13, Chris Dolan ’13, Isaac Evans ’13, Dwyane George ’15, Chris Klingshirn ’15, Luke O’Malley ’14.
Students looking for STEM internships, either for the summer or an academic semester, currently have no easy way to search for them. A student leaning toward a computer science major at MIT, for example, would have to look up individual university websites and individual company websites to find a CS internship opportunity. Once students have manually found links to these internship listings, they then submit separate applications to the various program coordinators. The problem now is that seeking out STEM internship opportunities is rather like trying to find a needle in several haystacks. It is a tedious, time-consuming and highly serendipitous process. Currently, there isn’t a single web portal that aggregates all possible STEM internships from small startups to large biotech firms to universities to government agencies like NASA.
STEMid (STEM internship database) is a web platform that aggregates STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) internship listings scattered across the internet with a web 2.0 user interface. It seeks to be a two-sided portal connecting students and applicants to STEM internship providers, while streamlining the application process. For students, STEMid offers tools to save and compare positions, filters (location, research topic and level) and ways to keep track of application deadlines. For internship providers, both academic and commercial, STEMid enables administrators to post internship listings and integrate the database with their own internal IT systems, thus offering a way to manage their listings in real-time.
Team: Ignatius Chen ’13, Melissa Choi, Roodolph St. Pierre and Marc-Dannie.