See the related article at MIT News.

The MIT Council for Educational Technology (MITCET) and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) are pleased to announce WhichClass as the grand prize winner and Lounge and EduCase as the runners-up of the 2013 iCampus Student Prize competition.

2013 Winners

Winners Recognized

Aakanksha Sarda, ’14, WhichClass, and Abubakar Abid, ’15, Lounge, were recognized during the Office of Digital Learning retreat on May 17, 2013. (Sara Itani, ’12/’G of EduCase was unable to attend the award presentation.)

Aakanksha Sarda Receives Grand Prize Award

Abubakar Abid, ’15 Receives Runner Up Prize

WhichClass: Grand Prize Winner

WhichClass

Which classes cover the material I want to learn? Which classes match my learning style/objectives? WhichClass is an online exploration tool to make it easier to filter classes, and visualize connections between classes within and across departments. WhichClass was developed by Aakanksha Sarda, ’14.

In addition to it’s primary audience of students, the judges saw the potential of WhichClass to better to understand the relationships between courses across departments. These insights are especially important as MIT continues to explore all aspects of digital learning. Aakanksha received $6,000 as the grand prize winner. OEIT will be working with Aakanksha once she returns from her summer abroad to further develop WhichClass.

Lounge: Runner Up

Lounge

The team of Abubakar Abid ’15, Abdulrahman Alfozan ’15 and Aziz Alghunaim ’15 observed that MIT undergraduates across different dorms feel that the housing assignment process, particularly for returning students, is unnecessarily slow, manual, and prone to errors. As a result, they created Lounge, an electronic platform that speeds up and automates the housing process, while giving dorms the flexibility to preserve their individual housing traditions.

Abubakar accepted the $3,000 in prizes on behalf of his teammates. During the award ceremony, he also announced that Lounge was used to successfully run Maseeh Hall’s Fall 2013 room assignment process. OEIT expects that the Lounge team will continue to refine their software and work with more dorms to implement it in future years.

EduCase: Runner Up

EduCase

EduCase bills itself as the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to record video lectures – no cameraman, no hours wasted editing. A professor walks into a class, folds open his EduCase, and presses a button for a hassle-free-lecture-recording experience. The EduCase team includes Sara Itani, ’12/’Grad and Adin Schmahmann, ’13.

The judges were very interested in the potential of EduCase to help streamline the process of recording lecture videos as MIT expands further into digital and online learning. OEIT will work with the EduCase team as they continue to develop the project.

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.

Which classes cover the material I want to learn? With the introduction of new flexible/interdisciplinary majors, new classes and the likely divergence of a studentʼs interests from their advisorʼs/upperclassmen friendsʼ, it is getting harder for students to identify the best classes to take, especially to learn about material at the intersection of traditional fields.

Which classes match my learning style/objectives? Some students prefer lab-heavy classes, others prefer PSets. Some students want a light class to make time for a UROP, others want the 30 hrs/wk monster. How good the textbook is matters differently to students, etc etc. While Subject Evaluations collect plenty of information, it is locked up in a hard to access and compare format.

WhichClass is an online exploration tool to make it easier to filter classes, and visualize
connections between classes within and across departments.

• Filter classes by learning preferences. Interactively select classes based on Subject Evaluations
  (workload, feedback, overall rating etc), enrollment, professor, department etc.
• Visualize connections between classes. Quickly see (in a dynamic graph) which classes cover
  similar material (within and across departments). Also see connections based on professor, etc.

WhichClass has the potential to make the class selection process significantly faster and easier. It will reduce search processes like the one in the example to just a few minutes, and make it much easier for students to leverage the rich diversity of classes offered by different departments (as well as the information locked up in Subject Evaluations) to make better choices.

Team: Aakanksha Sarda ’14

Campus Preview Weekends (CPW) at MIT plays a big role in students’ decisions on whether or not they want to come to the school for the next four years. A key factor for students is their experience with the people that they meet that weekend, particularly other admits.

Oftentimes, the first thing admits do after the visit is try to find the other admits they meet on Facebook. While sometimes successful, other times it can be a frustrating process because of issues such as forgetting how to spell their names, multiple entries of the same name, etc. MIT has tried to tackle this problem in the past by distributing USB devices that allow for the exchange of contact information via infrared signals, but this has quickly become obsolete in the increasingly mobile world.

touchBase has created a business card that looks and feels like a traditional paper cards, but its information can be downloaded to a touchscreen smartphone with just a simple tap. They want a pack of these personalized business cards to be given out to each admit during CPW as a part of their welcome package.

The business cards leverage of the capacitive touch technology that is present in all touchscreen smartphones, regardless of operating system. Embedded within each card is a thin layer of conductive material. The conductive material in each card is arranged in different dot patterns, thus registering as if they were “fingers” touching the phone at different positions. When the card is tapped on a smartphone, the associated app will identify the unique pattern and download the contact information from a cloud server. Prior to coming to CPW, users can specify what information they are willing to share via the cards. If they wish, users can even choose to provide a link to their Facebook accounts to make for easy “friending”.

Team: Sai To Yeung, ’14, Frank Ni, ’14, James Allen, ’16, Jon Warneke, ’15

As a freshman coming to MIT, many students have no clue what a terminal was or how it could be used to interact with the computer. The main computing environment available to students in Athena clusters is Ubuntu Linux. While using the terminal is not required to use the Athena computers, the ability to navigate the command line interface is a powerful tool in computing at MIT. The problem is clear: students who first are exposed to the Linux terminal on Athena do not know how to approach learning it they learn painfully slowly by accidentally hearing from someone else that a particular command exists. These students are not using the Athena computing environment to the fullest extent.

Gamification, play, and fun are arguably the most effective ways of learning a skill. The Terminus team wanted to combine play with the tedious (and often difficult) task of learning how to navigate a command line. At the same time, they wanted to throw some nostalgia at MIT students. The solution they came up with was a text-based adventure game entitled Terminus, aimed to teach the player to use the command line with basic commands. You are placed into a magical world where you are forced to explore the world with the “cd”, “ls”, and “less” spells you are allowed to “touch” objects, “mv” things, and interact with interesting characters and locations. Your tasks are numerous and interesting you are forced to explore every item you see, talk to every character, and visit almost every location. But you are allowed to do this at your own pace with minimal guidance. Rather than spinning this as a learning experience, the main goal is to have fun exploring a textbased adventure world.

They want to make the command line less scary, but at the same time riveting and engaging. With the addition of graphics, a plot line, comical text, and a set of silly challenges, we hope to immerse the user in the world, getting them more familiar with the standard commands used in a terminal interface.

Team: Michele Pratusevich ’13, Shawn Conrad, MEng ’13

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.

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