Digital Commons Network^™

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Culminating Experience Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …

Exploring Using Game-Based Learning And Gamification In A Secondary Classroom To Increase Engagement, Mandee Lynn Thiell

Culminating Experience Projects

Research has connected the importance of student engagement and student experience within the classroom but continue to use teacher directed traditional teaching methods. This project explores the use of gamification and game-based learning and how it promotes student engagement. The use of games and game-elements provide a relevant approach that focuses on student autonomy and experience, and ultimately use fun engaging ways to motivate students to learn. This project provides an entry level learning in-service opportunity for secondary educators to discover and create their own lessons that implement gamification and game-based learning in their classrooms in hopes to increase student …

Addressing The Problem Of Student Engagement In The Classroom, Levi R. Urias

Culminating Experience Projects

The problem of student engagement is one that is faced by teachers everywhere. While multiple strategies exist for combating this issue, project-based learning and inquiry-based learning are two that stand out in the multitude of research. Additionally, these strategies are ideal in the science classroom as they align very well with the Next Generation Science Standards that are used in Michigan, including rural Southwest Michigan school, Eau Claire High School. This project explores these instructional strategies and their various benefits which include improved critical thinking, improved social skills, and improved questioning skills.

Culmination Project, Ashley A. Zuidema

Culminating Experience Projects

Investigations have revealed vital information about the issue regarding student academic motivation, yet many students’ continue to fail, struggle, and drop out, including students’ at Holland Public Schools. This project explores the recent loss of academic motivation as well as the educational discussions regarding how to improve this train of thought. An effective student is required to display a positive outlook on their education, the different needs for improvement, and ways to focus on success. The academic motivation process influences the needs of students’ through fun Friday’s, school store, and school focused education groups. Additionally, the D.U.T.C.H. matrix used (Diverse, …

Cultivating Lifelong Readers: A Study Of How English Teachers Can Bring Pleasure Back Into The Reading Lives Of Students, Kaylie Jo Schertzing

Culminating Experience Projects

Research has revealed that many of today’s students are not reading for pleasure. Although research shows that recreational reading is linked with academic success, educational policies have left reading for pleasure out of focus and instead emphasize a particular type of reading that is assessed on mandated tests. As a result of curriculum reforms, English Language Arts curriculum has been narrowed and left reading for pleasure out of focus. This project explores the history of curriculum reform in the United States as it relates to the teaching of English Language Arts as well as recent research surrounding how recreational reading …

Conversations About Book Challenges And Bans: Civil Discourse Through Talking Frames And Sentence Stems, Alonna Lynn Liabenow

Culminating Experience Projects

Book challenges and bans are more prevalent than ever in the year 2022. The conversations surrounding the challenge of a book are often very stressful for the librarian, teacher, or administrator involved. This project seeks to ease some of that stress by giving the parties involved in conversation a talking frame. These talking frames are based on the norms of civil discourse and make use of sentence stems to guide potentially tense and awkward conversations.

Full-Text Search Using Elasticsearch, Akash Shrestha

Culminating Experience Projects

Search engines have changed the way we use the internet. They can search or filter out relevant and valuable content of interest to the users. But many of the applications we use today lack search or are just poor. So how can we leverage the same power of search engines in our applications? This project aims to look at “Full-Text Search” which allows us to do a text-based search in text-intensive data. The search will be performed by matching any, or all words of the query exactly or with some relevancy against the indexes created by the searching tool. The …

Muse: A Genetic Algorithm For Musical Chord Progression Generation, Griffin Going

Culminating Experience Projects

Foundational to our understanding and enjoyment of music is the intersection of harmony and movement. This intersection manifests as chord progressions which themselves underscore the rhythm and melody of a piece. In musical compositions, these progressions often follow a set of rules and patterns which are themselves frequently broken for the sake of novelty. In this work, we developed a genetic algorithm which learns these rules and patterns (and how to break them) from a dataset of 890 songs from various periods of the Billboard Top 100 rankings. The algorithm learned to generate increasingly valid, yet interesting chord progressions via …

Devops: Course Development, James Lee Vanderzouwen

Culminating Experience Projects

DevOps has become somewhat of a buzzword amongst software engineers in the industry. Often developers do not have a dedicated DevOps engineer let alone a DevOps team. Developers benefit when they know what happens between ‘works on my machine’ and production. Making sure those steps make sense and are safe benefits the operations team. From compliance to code review to regression testing, understanding the full SDLC, employing DevOps concepts, and minimizing overhead from dependencies is quickly becoming a pre-requisite for the modern software engineer. This project attempts to bridge the gap between buzzword and best practice by developing a college-level …

Exploring Coral Reefs With Interactive Geospatial Visualizations, David Nicolas Tonning

Culminating Experience Projects

This project uses geospatial data to generate custom polygons in an interactive setting to represent the size and location of coral reefs to extract insights from coral reef-centered data sets. Historically, the data used by the Reef Restoration Group Bonaire exists in disparate sources, making it difficult to track and analyze the outcomes of their restoration work. Additionally, this information is not available in a digestible format for other audiences who would be interested in this data, such as citizen scientists seeking coral reef health statistics, the general public wanting to better understand the coral reefs surrounding Bonaire or recreational …

Travel Dashboard, Naveen Kumar Lalam

Culminating Experience Projects

Travel Dashboard is a one stop solution for all the travel needs of travelers and tourists visiting a new place. In today’s world travel has become a part of everyone’s life and we love to travel whenever there is a holiday or long a weekend. Earlier, the travel industry was mostly dictated by tour operators who used to plan and organize tours with standard itinerary, while tourists had very limited choices and needed to pick one of the itineraries given by operator as there was no other option left for them. Time have changed now as travelers love to plan …

Covid-19 Prediction Using Machine Learning, Parashuram Singaraveni

Culminating Experience Projects

All around the globe, humankind faces a disastrous situation that witnessed COVID-19 outbreak. The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe loss of human life across the world. Most of the countries had been socially and economically weakened. The health sector faced lots of challenges in diagnosing the COVID patients, vaccinating the people, identifying the people who are infected by the virus. At the earlier stage, it has been difficult to identify the symptoms in infected person that is caused by the virus. Months later, symptoms were identified and, disease detecting machines were invented. But still, time taking for the results from the …

Curriculum Development In Technical Education For Boys And Girls Club, Damanpreet Singh

Culminating Experience Projects

Technical education has been and will continue to be more and more important to succeed in the future. The Boys and Girls Club, founded in 1860, is a national organization of local chapters which provide voluntary after-school programs for young individuals. The Boys and Girls Club have life-changing programs that prepare the young individuals in the club for their future whether it’s for college, career, or life. The perfect way to prepare best prepare these kids for the future is to develop their technical education. Unfortunately, the boys and girls club of Muskegon has a lack of educational resources for …

Malware Detection And Analysis, Namratha Suraneni

Culminating Experience Projects

Malicious software poses a serious threat to the cybersecurity of network infrastructures and is a global pandemic in the form of computer viruses, Trojan horses, and Internet worms. Studies imply that the effects of malware are deteriorating. The main defense against malware is malware detectors. The methods that such a detector employ define its level of quality. Therefore, it is crucial that we research malware detection methods and comprehend their advantages and disadvantages. Attackers are creating malware that is polymorphic and metamorphic and has the capacity to modify their source code as they spread. Furthermore, existing defenses, which often utilize …

Notebooks Web Application, Vivekananda Marellali

Culminating Experience Projects

In our day-to-day activities we often need to make quick short notes related to our work, study, or other activities. Later, those notes should be easy to access, modify, delete, share with others, or create PDF documents as and when required. It is ideal if the note content is rich text format such as HTML, as it provides many text formatting options and provide better view and readability. The Notes are better organized if they are grouped into notebooks where each notebook consists of related topic note pages and multiple users can create such notebooks and share with other users …

Hybrid Life Cycles In Software Development, Eric Vincent Schoenborn

Culminating Experience Projects

This project applied software specification gathering, architecture, work planning, and development to a real-world development effort for a local business. This project began with a feasibility meeting with the owner of Zeal Aerial Fitness. After feasibility was assessed the intended users, needed functionality, and expected user restrictions were identified with the stakeholders. A hybrid software lifecycle was selected to allow a focus on base functionality up front followed by an iterative development of expectations of the stakeholders. I was able to create various specification diagrams that express the end projects goals to both developers and non-tech individuals using a standard …

College Job Portal, Harikrishna Gonuguntla

Culminating Experience Projects

Through this project, I am producing a portal called "College Job Portal" that will make life easier for students, colleges, and the companies who hire the students by handling the hiring process. On-campus job placements are a crucial component in contemporary educational institutions. By entering information about their educational history, grades, technological abilities, and CV, students would register with the portal. Like students, companies would sign up with the site by supplying basic details like their address and contact information for human resources. The college would be the portal's administrator. Companies can advertise job openings using this site by including …

Building A Deep Model For Multi-Class Coral Species Discrimination, Hyeong Gyu Jang

Culminating Experience Projects

The goal of this qualitative research project is to develop and optimize a multi-class discrimination model to identify different species of coral based on their digital images. Currently, there are artificial intelligence (AI) models that can distinguish between coral and other undersea objects such as sand or rocks, but to our knowledge the problem of multi-species classification has not yet been addressed. Given that coral reefs are a good indicator of overall ocean health, it is important to develop models that can classify the presence of different species in underwater images as a way to monitor the effects of climate …

Docker Container Image – Vulnerability Scanning, Joseph U. Ohaeche

Culminating Experience Projects

The technology landscape for container adoption has greatly evolved over the years from the first known Unix U7 container concept introduced in 1979 to the most utilized docker container concept which emerged in 2013. Docker container image is essentially a lightweight, standalone executable software package with capabilities to run an application. It is important to know that container images become containers when deployed, and simultaneously docker container images become docker containers when deployed on Docker Engine. This project paper aims, evaluates, and presents a methodology useful in vulnerability scanning of docker container images and suggests possible fixes based on OWASP …

Big Data Analytics Of Medical Data, Ashwin Rajasankar

Culminating Experience Projects

Data has become a huge part of modern decision making. With the improvements in computing performance and storage in the past two decades, storing large amounts of data has become much easier. Analyzing large amounts of data and creating data models with them can help organizations obtain insights and information which helps their decision making. Big data analytics has become an integral part of many fields such as retail, real estate, education, and medicine. In the project, the goal is to understand the working of Apache Spark and its different storage methods and create a data warehouse to analyze data. …

Supporting English Learners In The General Classroom, Stephanie L. Gamble

Culminating Experience Projects

The American public school classroom is rapidly changing, and as a result the needs in the classroom are changing. According to the NYU Steinhart school of culture, the average K-12 public school classroom is made up of about 20% English language learners. Researchers predict that percentage will climb to 25% by the year 2025, making EL students the fastest growing population in American public schools (Staff, 2021). The purpose of my research was to find ways that educators can better reach these students and decrease the opportunity gap between these students and their peers. Teachers across the country are struggling …

Examining Teaching Practices That Increase Student Mathematical Achievement, Jonah P. Zimmerman

Culminating Experience Projects

The current data in the United States surrounding mathematics shows that there are issues that must be addressed with teaching and learning math in the K-12 setting. In the perfect world, all students would meet grade level expectations in math prior to moving to another grade; however, this is not what is taking place. Students are not meeting proficiency, and as a result teachers and students alike are not gaining confidence in teaching/learning mathematics. This project looks at the Math Workshop Model as being one alternative to the more traditional teaching practices that are used today in the ABC School …

Nutrition Education As A Tool Of Empowerment, Claire Devries

Culminating Experience Projects

This study investigates the nutrition education programs implemented by organizations that operate Fresh Markets in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the goal of connecting empowered nutrition education to a food justice context. A review of scholarly literature reveals that there has been limited published work within the last three decades that integrates empowered nutrition to a food justice context. Analysis of interviews conducted with the four organizations indicates that nutrition education is used as a tool of empowerment in a food justice framework. However, this study reveals that nutrition education cannot be used alone as a tool of empowerment, rather it …

Elements Of Early Warning Systems: Identifying Students Who Need Support Early Enough To Change Their Trajectory Towards Graduation, Samantha Mayse

Culminating Experience Projects

Student success initiatives have been a focus at many institutions of higher education to help with retention rates but identifying the students who need the student success resources most can be challenging. Scholarships increase access to higher education but do not necessarily contribute to student success. Thus, this research project sought to analyze early alert systems used by mid-sized universities in the U.S. Midwest to help similar institutions in developing their own early alert system. Using mixed methods, this study included a qualitative analysis of institution’s policies and procedures for early warning systems and a quantitative analysis of GVSU institutional …

How Can Design Thinking Be A Tool For Inspiring Creativity Among Adult Learners, Nicole J. Brower

Culminating Experience Projects

This research will partner the best practices of creativity education and those of adult learners to answer how design thinking can inspire creativity among adult learners in higher education. This survey-based qualitative research project used thematic analysis to gather the impression of instructors who use design thinking in their teaching and adult students who have encountered design thinking in their higher education coursework. Gathering impressions and coding the data highlights a theme that may shed light on the research question.

Impacting Michigan Latino Students’ Perceptions Of Higher Education: How To Better Communicate And Promote 4-Year College Degree Opportunities, Michael A. Guerra

Culminating Experience Projects

In the state of Michigan, the marginalization of Latino students continues due to historical and social factors; this is ultimately reflected in higher education enrollment and graduation rates when compared to their White peers, the dominant group in the state (MI School Data, 2022). For varying reasons, not every student will seek higher education after high school, but it is worth ensuring opportunities and reasons to attend are properly communicated for sake of helping Latino students better explore all their college and career options. While the Michigan Latino population has the highest labor force participation compared to other racial or …

Spinal Cord Dose Reduction Using A Jaw-Blocking Vmat Technique - A Retrospective Study Of Chordoma And Chondrosarcoma Patients, Amber Wyatt

Culminating Experience Projects

Chordomas and chondrosarcomas are rare tumors that commonly experience loco-regional recurrence after primary treatment, making management of these tumors complex and difficult. Published case series reporting post-surgical outcomes for chordoma indicate that loco-regional recurrence affects more than 50% of patients treated with macroscopic complete resection with or without RT. Notably, a high proportion of recurrences occur late (after 5 and 10 years), requiring long-term follow-up. Chordomas and chondrosarcomas are considered to be radioresistant and require high doses of radiation greater than 60 Gy (Catanzano et al., 2019). There is a little data available regarding the most effective way to minimize …

When Comparing Hyperarc And Gammaknife Treatment Techniques For Brain Metastasis, Which Technique Offers Optimal Treatment To Achieve The Highest Biological Effective Dose (Bed)?, Carrie Merfert

Culminating Experience Projects

Introduction

HyperArc-VMAT and GammaKnife treatment techniques are both considered to be the best types of SRS treatment methods regarding conformity, homogeneity, gradient, and mean brain dose. The BED calculation is used to calculate the treatment regimens that are effective biologically and used for extrapolation to normal tissue limits.

Methods

This is a retrospective study that analyzes 15 lesions from 10 randomly selected patients with brain metastasis within the cerebrum. Each of the lesions had a single fraction treatment plan created using the same PTV for the HyperArc-VMAT and GammaKnife techniques. Each treatment technique was dose escalated until the healthy brain …

Supporting Teachers With Project-Based Learning Implementation Through Professional Development, Anna Shamery

Culminating Experience Projects

Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been proven to positively impact motivation, academic achievement, the acquisition of 21st century skills, and classroom community. Though many teachers are enthusiastic about this teaching and learning method, educators struggle with PBL implementation. Both teachers and students have a difficult time adapting to the new roles required in this learner-centered approach. Time constraints and curriculum demands also make PBL implementation challenging. However, high-quality professional development which incorporates adult learning theories can lead to successful PBL use in the classroom. This project outlines a year-long PBL professional development plan designed for K-5 teachers. During a week-long summer …

Supporting Transgender And Nonbinary Middle School Students Through Inclusive Policies And Practices, Victoria Velding

Culminating Experience Projects

The United States is experiencing a youth mental health crisis. Research suggests rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation have reached concerning levels in transgender and nonbinary youth. School can be a hostile place for marginalized youth. Transgender and nonbinary youth are especially susceptible to harassment and victimization, making school a particularly hostile place. When schools offer support and LGBTQ resources, school experiences can be improved for transgender and nonbinary youth. Unfortunately, school-wide supports and resources for LGBTQ students are less common in middle schools than high schools, leaving many students struggling at a critical developmental stage in their lives. …