Undergraduate Research | George R. Brown School of Engineering

Undergraduate Research | George R. Brown School of Engineering | Rice University

Undergraduate Research in Engineering at Rice

Graham Richard Hull, Junior Electrical and Computer Engineering student
Developing Software Tools to Create and Use Connexions Modules
with Dr. Richard Baraniuk
As a member of the Connexions Project, my primary task in the summer of 2001 was the development of software tools to create and view organized groups of Connexions modules.
One of the great strengths of the Connexions Project is the modularization of information into small, discrete sections, called modules. Since the modules are small in size and largely self-contained, they are highly convenient to author, manage, and use.
The down side of this approach is that we end up with a vast quantity of modules organized in no particular fashion, making it difficult for a learner to navigate.
The solution to this navigational problem is the Roadmap, a web-based program that reads in data about a group of modules (called a context) and displays this data in a user-friendly manner in a web browser. The contexts themselves have an enormous degree of flexibility, and their creation is a fascinating area in itself, but my main responsibility was reading and displaying them in a web browser, such as Netscape Navigator. The most common form of a context is a course--a series of modules organized linearly, into chapters, much like a digital textbook, but considerably more flexible and powerful in design.
Technically, this was an enormous challenge. Until very recently (the past year) there was no effective way to dynamically display data on the web. Several emerging technologies have improved this situation, including XML, dynamic HTML, and the latest versions of the Mozilla browser, on which Netscape Navigator is based. All of these tools are still very much in development themselves, so learning their use was an arduous process. If we ran into a problem, the odds were that we were the first people to run across that problem, so there was nowhere we could look for an easy answer. We had to write the answer ourselves.
The issue of usabity or ‘user-friendliness’ was a subtler point that we also addressed. This is an issue that is frequently neglected in software design, but we sought the advice of experts on usability, and incorporated their suggestions into the designs.
From a personal perspective, I contributed to a large, ongoing project, learned to work with cutting-edge software technologies, and gained experience working with a team on a particular task, within a larger team working on a major project.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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George R. Brown School of Engineering, Rice University grbsoe@rice.edu