Engineering Projects in Community Service

Butler University

Fairbanks Center for Communications and Technology

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

 

 

Please check our new web site at http://epics.butler.edu

 

EPICS PowerPoint Presentations

 

 

EPICS Publications

 

·        SIGCSC 2002 (Panel discussion paper)

·        FIE 2002 (Panel discussion paper)

 

One-page Handouts

 

·        EPICS at Butler “at-a-glance”

·        The SIA project “at-a-glance”   First Award Winner at ISSAC2002

·        The URC project “at-a-glance”

 

Contact person: Prof. Panos Linos

Email: linos@butler.edu

Web: www.butler.edu/~linos

Voice: 317-940-8360

 

What is EPICS?

–    A service learning program for software engineering undergraduate students and eventually for other majors

–    It requires students participation in long-term, community service, multi-disciplinary projects

 

Brief History of EPICS

–    EPICS started during fall 1995 at Purdue University (see http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu)

–    Butler University joined the EPICS program during fall 2001

 

Goals of EPICS

Provide an environment where students can

·       Exercise their software engineering skills on realistic systems

·       Help a community service organization

·       Develop management and leadership skills

·       Establish professional attitude and habits

 

Benefits to EPICS Affiliates

•     Improvement of current services

•     Development of new services

•     Access to technical knowledge and resources that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise

•     Opportunity to try new, innovative ideas

•     Positions the affiliate as a leader among non-profit organizations

 

Benefits to EPICS Students

•     Communications skills

•     Analytical thinking

•     Teamwork

•     Start-to-finish project experience

•     Resource management

•     Organizational skills

•     Professional ethics

•     Customer awareness

•     Interdisciplinary experience

•     Resourcefulness

•     Community awareness

•     Maturity

•     Pride

 

Uniqueness of EPICS

•     Teams blend sophomores, juniors and seniors.

•     Students participate for up to three years.

•     Long-term projects span several semesters.

•     Students select their own projects;

•     Students apply their own creative ideas.

•     Invited speakers cover technical and managerial related topics.

 

Course Schedule

•     Team develops the semester plan including problem statement, objectives, timeline, member roles and continuity plan.

•     Conduct meetings with affiliates.

•     Gather and document requirements specifications.

•     Develop the project design and initiate the construction.

•     Deliver and install prototype software

•     Give a final project presentation.

 

Call for Participation

·       We are looking for non-for-profit organizations that would be interested in participating in the EPICS program at Butler University.

·       If you would like to discuss this further with us, please contact us. We will arrange for a meeting to talk more about this opportunity.

 
 

Current EPICS Projects At Butler University

 
The SIA Project

The “Spanish In Action” (SIA) group is developing educational software to aid middle-school students with their Spanish vocabulary.  In connection with Mr. Keith Burns and Crispus Attucks Middle School, SIA has created a web-based environment for users to test their skills, through an online game called “QuickDrop”.  Currently, the game is geared towards sixth grade students, but will eventually expand into other grades and possibly other languages.  The game is implemented in Macromedia Flash and PHP with a mySQL backend.  The goal of SIA is to improve vocabulary retention and make learning enjoyable for students.  In order to view SIA’s latest developments, please visit our web site at http://euclid.butler.edu/epics.

SIA team members include Julie Lally, Stephanie Herman, and Rachel Martin.  Julie is a junior studying computer science, math, and Spanish and is the captain of the SIA project.  Stephanie is a junior studying computer science and is the recorder and planner of the team.  Rachel is a sophomore studying computer science and music and is the spokesperson and the liaison for SIA.  The whole team is responsible for implementation, documentation and coding. A design report on SIA was submitted to the ISSAC 2002 and received the first award.

 
The URC Project

The Butler Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) in partnership with Eli Lilly and Company is an annual regional conference, which now routinely hosts over 500 students and faculty from approximately 45 area colleges and universities. The conference started in 1988 and has expanded to include both paper and poster presentation sessions across 18 disciplines. Undergraduate students wishing to make a presentation at the conference are required to submit an abstract of their work so that the abstracts can be compiled and printed in a program distributed to all attendees. Over the years as the conference grew, the need for a computerized registration and conference management system became critical. In 1998, we developed an in-house web-based registration and database system to help manage the conference. Each year the system has received some updates and new features, but it is in essence a system based on technologies available in 1998. The proposed project enatils an assessment of the current conference management system including recommendations for the acquisition of new hardware and software to modernize the system. The second part of the project involves the setting up and testing of the new system.

The EPICS team is using ColdFusion, MS IIS (Win2k) and SQL Server 2000 to re-engineer and modernize the current system. Goals of the project include robustness, ease-of-use, maintainability and expandability. After the gathering of requirement specifications, the team is building a prototype version, which entails additional features. Team members include Yaw Anokwa: Captain, Responsible for database, HTML, and GUI. Chris Hoffman: Planner, Recorder. Responsible for ColdFusion code., Charles Jochim: Spokesperson, Reflector, Responsible for re-engineering, PPT Presentations, and documentation

 

Some Pictures from EPICS at Butler University

 

 

Fall 2001,“Spanish In Action” Project,

 Crispus Attucks Middle School, Indianapolis.

From Left to Right: Rachel Martin, Jullie Lally, Yaw Anokwa, Mr. Burns, Prof. Linos, Stephanie Herman, Janice Harrell and Ann Heile.

 

 

Fall 2001, Ed Coyle’s Visit at Butler University

From Left to Right: Prof. Linos, Yaw Anokwa, Rachel Martin, Janice Harrell, Ann Heile, Stephanie Herman,  Jullie Lally and Prof. Ed Coyle from Purdue Unversity.

 

 

SRPING 2002, Visit at Oaks Academy

From Left to Right: Prof. Linos, Mr. Woodward, Charles Jochim, “the most popular fellow in 4th grade”, Yaw Anokwa and Chris Hoffman.

 

 

SPRING 2002: Visit at AVL Virtual Reality Lab at IUPUI.

From left to right: Jullie Lally, Stephanie Herman, Rachel Martin and Panos Linos.

 

 

 

 

SPRING 2002: Service Learning Conference at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. In the picture shown are members from EPICS teams at Purdue and Butler Universities.

 

May 2002: INITA CyberStar 2002 Awards Ceremony. In the picture shown are, from left to right, Panos Linos, Rachel Martin, Stephanie Herman and David Becker.

 

 

 

SPRING 2002: Service Learning Conference at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. In the picture shown is Julie Lally explaining the SIA Epics project.