Involving%20Undergrads%20in%20Research

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Involving Undergrads in Research

• Mike Overstreet
• Computers Science
• February 8,2002

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Outline

• Context project description
• Types of student involvement
• Our experiences
• Funding possibilities

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Background

• Faculty K. Maly (PI) H. Abdel-Wahab, C. Wild, A.
  Gupta, M. Overstreet
• Project Interactive Remote Instruction
• Construct a virtual classroom where students
  can freely interact with
• instructor
• other class members
• class materials
• Understand how to use new capabilities
• Understand support infrastructure needed

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IRI-h Classroom one siteImagine people at home,
at work, at ODU sites (Penn, VaBch)

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IRI-h screen

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Unfunded student participation

• Evaluation of IRI as teaching/ learning tool
• By taking classes through IRI
• provide informal feedback
• By participation in formal evaluation studies
• PhD in education more interaction in IRI or in
  traditional classroom?

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Funded student participation

• Code Testing
• Help locate bugs
• Experimentation
• Performance studies
• e.g. response time vs number of participants
• Code development
• Support tools
• Lots of web development
• Documentation evaluation and revision
• Documentation development

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Benefits to researcher

• Some risks
• Some students require more supervision than
  others
• No different from grad students
• Takes time, regardless
• Taylor tasks to students strengths
• Need to find independent tasks
• In summary, weve gotten a great deal from these
  students most made signi-ficant contributions to
  the project

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Benefits to funded students

• Use of cutting-edge technologies
• Access to neat toys
• Exposure to some complexities of real software
  projects
• Genuine excitement about participation
• Opportunity to learn new skills
• Closer interaction with project faculty and
  gifted grad students
• Gratifying for something theyve developed to
  really be used
• unlike class homework

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Benefits to unfunded students

• Use of cutting-edge technologies
• Access to neat toys
• Genuine excitement about participation (though
  this is not universal)
• Opportunity to learn new skills
• More mixed response some bleeding-edge effects

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NSF funding Research Experience for Undergrads

• 2 forms of funding
• New grant with primary goal of involving
  undergrads in research
• due 9/15 of each year for REU sites
• Supplements existing NSF grant to support
  undergrads
• due dates vary
• www.nsf.gov, search for REU