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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Engaging Game Design Students Using Peer Evaluation, Amber Settle, Charles Wilcox, Chad Settle Oct 2011

Engaging Game Design Students Using Peer Evaluation, Amber Settle, Charles Wilcox, Chad Settle

Amber Settle

Many information technology educators have worked in recent years to develop courses to attract students to the field. As faculty achieve success with technical courses designed to be appeal to a broad audience, it can be hard to maintain the initial excitement particularly as multiple sections of the courses are taught on a continuing basis. In this article we describe a project that added peer evaluation to an assessment in a game design course with a large non-major audience. While controversial, peer evaluation has shown some promise in motivating students to work harder and in improving certain key skills. Consistent …


Computational Thinking In A Game Design Course, Amber Settle Oct 2011

Computational Thinking In A Game Design Course, Amber Settle

Amber Settle

As a part of an NSF-funded project to enhance computational thinking in undergraduate general education courses, activities and assessments were developed for a game design course taught at DePaul University. The focus of the course is on game analysis and design, but the course textbook uses an approach that is heavily grounded in computational thinking principles. We describe the course activities and assignments and discuss an initial assessment of those materials. Our results show that there is a gap in difficulty between several of the activities and indicate that the materials developed help students to better learn the computational thinking …


Does Lecture Capture Make A Difference For Students In Traditional Classrooms, Amber Settle, Lucia Dettori, Mary Jo Davidson Jun 2011

Does Lecture Capture Make A Difference For Students In Traditional Classrooms, Amber Settle, Lucia Dettori, Mary Jo Davidson

Amber Settle

The College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) at DePaul University has recorded thousands of courses using an in-house system called Course Online (COL) since 2001. These recordings are available not only to students enrolled in online CDM courses, but also to students in traditional classrooms at CDM. In this study we analyzed survey responses and grade data to determine whether traditional students found COL recordings to be a valuable substitutional tool and whether the recordings had any impact on student performance. We found that a large majority of traditional CDM students find the recordings useful and believe that they …


Mesosphereic Temperature Variability And Seasonal Characteristics Over The Andes, Jonathan R. Pugmire, Yucheng Zhao, Michael J. Taylor, Dominique Pautet May 2011

Mesosphereic Temperature Variability And Seasonal Characteristics Over The Andes, Jonathan R. Pugmire, Yucheng Zhao, Michael J. Taylor, Dominique Pautet

Jonathan Pugmire

The Utah State University CEDAR Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (MTM) is a high-quality CCD imager capable of remote sensing faint optical emissions from the night sky to determine mesospheric temperature and its variability at an altitude of ~87 km. The MTM was operated at the new Andes Lidar Observatory (ALO)located at Cerro Pachon, Chile (30.2° S, 70.7° W) since August 2009 to investigate the seasonal characteristic of the mesopause at mid-latitudes. Measurement were made alongside a powerful lidar capable of height sounding the mesosphere. In this study, the MTM data have been analyzed to determine night to night variability and seasonal …