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Project Prospectus

Here are my cleaned up notes from the in-class ideation session.

Phase 1: Ideate

1. Student Progress Tracker

Since I am a computer science educator, I want to visualize student progress in a way that helps me out; this could potentially be a useful tool for other teachers as well.

2. Political Networks

I think I’ve seen some examples of this already, so this would be more for personal enrichment; I would visualize the different connections of company officials and politicians. This would require a lot of digging for data from different sources.

I’m interested in what online communities artists are now using to share their works and connect with other artists, since that’s something I’m personally interested in doing.

Phase 2: Develop

I decided to develop the Student Progress Tracker idea, since it was the most relevant to what I do daily. Though I initially had 3 approaches, upon reviewing my notes I think they can be condensed into 2 different ideas.

Approach 1

This approach has two parts: an educator view and a student view. These views could be accessed through the same portal; while learning management systems exist, many of them are built upon the assumption of a points-based grading system, and I have found it difficult to use these systems for standards.

The educator’s view would include a dashboard that gives an overview of how a class is doing, and upon “zooming in” could visualize more details about a specific topic, lesson, or student.

The student view would include how they are currently doing in the class, what topics they need to work on to achieve their goals, and the standards that they have shown mastery of. It would be a comprehensive and transparent way of communicating their progress.

Approach 2

This approach is more focused on the research behind learning management systems. I mainly had questions that I would then have to find datasets for, and this would lead mostly to exploratory visualizations. The questions I had include: