InstructorLedProjects

Latest revision as of 16:20, 13 November 2021

Open Energy Dashboard

Open Energy Dashboard (OED) is a sustainability project that is Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS). It has been developed by faculty and students and is in use to improve energy use on multiple college campuses. From an instructor’s perspective, OED offers:

• It was created and is coordinated by a professor (Steven Huss-Lederman) where academic goals are integral to the project. Steve now volunteers full-time in support of OED.
• Several dozen CS students from five colleges/universities have actively participated in OED where the proposed mentoring (at least weekly video meetings) and support have already been successfully used.
• Instructor support from Steve both before and during course use with everything from meeting course goals to issues involving OED usage. It is anticipated that the same support will be available in reusing OED in a later course.
• Steve can, as desired, provide course targeted issues and work for students that effectively integrates them in OED and guides them toward deeper understanding. It is generally possible to focus student work on certain technologies (front-end, back-end, database, graphics, CI/testing, etc.) and areas to better suit a course's goals.

From a student’s perspective, OED offers:

• OED revolves around sustainability, a topic that excites students and their friends.
• Quality onboarding including getting started documentation, help documentation, good first issues, information on OED pull request requirements, FAQ with common developer issues, etc.
• OED offers extensive support and mentoring to all students and/or student teams involved in the project including GitHub discussion board and direct contact.
• Support all student machines: Docker install for easy installation that limits impact on student machines; runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows 10; has very modest CPU needs; needs about 2GB disk space.

Project information:

• OED is a dashboard that collects, analyzes, stores and displays energy usage.
• OED uses modern software including JavaScript/TypeScript with promises, PostgreSQL, React, Redux, Plotly (graphics) and Chia/Mocha.
• The code base is neither trivial nor very large (~43k lines of code)
• OED is over five years old with ongoing development driven by user needs.

What we envision for OED in a course:

• Is available for inclusion into a course anytime during the 2021-22 academic year or a future year.
• While OED can work in a range of courses, ones with more advanced students such as software engineering, capstone, open source project courses, etc., are likely to be better fits at this time.
• There are possibilities for individual and team student work and various class sizes where OED expects to discuss this with an instructor to optimize for each course.

LibreFoodPantry

LibreFoodPantry is a project that strives to support local food pantries with quality, free and open source software (FOSS) to help them serve their guests. LibreFoodPantry is developing food pantry applications for Western New England University, Worcester State University and Nassau Community College.

FarmData2

FarmData2 is a an application that supports the operation and certification requirements for small organic farming operations. Features include:

• Web application for recording and reporting on crop and livestock production within the context of small organic farming operations
• Crop production records include seeding, transplanting, harvest, cover crop, compost, fertilization, irrigation, pest scouting, and spray activities
• Livestock production records track animals from birth to slaughter or sale and include pasture moves, periodic and veterinary care and logging of egg production
• Records of packing, distribution and customer invoicing are also maintained
• All records and reporting features are designed to closely align with organic certification requirements and to support the certification and recertification process