I have a number of goals in mind for how I plan to use the knowledge and experience I gain as a Kenan Fellow doing an internship at the NC State ASSIST Center to improve my curriculum. As I have on the About My Fellowship page, one of my goals relates to learning about the different kinds of visualization techniques that are used to help make sense of various measurements taken with a variety of scientific tools so I can do a better job of teaching my students how they are used in research.
But, a more hands-on, useful thing that I hope to bring back from my internship is in relation to both programming and data visualization. In Scientific Visualization, students learn about conducting experiments, collecting data, and making sense of it. As I have been listening to my mentor and the other speakers whom he has brought in explain to our group how sensors are used to collect data, what problems exist with designing them and what goes on at the ASSIST Center, in general, the thought crosses my mind that I can use the same devices and techniques we are learning with my students to complete this specific unit in Sci Vis. Students can be taught to define a simple problem where the sensors and an Arduino or TI SensorTag can be used to collect the data about the problem and students can then be taught how to use a spreadsheet to illustrate that data in an easy to use manner.
Another useful area I am learning about during my internship is programming. My students in Advanced Game Design learn to program their games using C# in the Unity game engine, which is VERY similar to the Arduino programming language that we are using to build our wearable devices. The problem with students learning to code directly in Unity is that they often get easily distracted from learning the basics of logical coding by all the neat, whiz-bang visuals that Unity allows them to do. Using the Arduino, students can grow to understand the basics of coding and logic without the distractions. They can then see how their code affects the sensors such as LEDs, temperature temperature and readings. They can then translate this knowledge into Unity to design games with a much better understanding of the logic used by programming languages.
These are just a few of the areas that I plan to use with my students. I am sure there are many more that I will certainly discuss at a later time.