There are two instructors in Fall, 2021. Some of the following projects are assigned to a specific instructor, but others will be determined based on interest. Continuing projects include both those under current development and ones that were developed in the past. In some cases the technology is specified, but in others the team can help pick the technology with the product owner's approval. Projects are in alphabetical order and numbered for convenience.
We will send a survey to all students who are likely to take SDL in the fall. The students will rank the projects by order of interest; instructors will form the teams based on the interests. We are generally able to place everyone in one of their top choices, but this is not always possible. If a student does not rank projects, then that student will be assigned to whatever team has open positions. You will work on the project for a year, so it is important that you express your interests.
PO: Dr. Magaña
Continuing project: AboutTime is a system which integrates with GitLab to report time spent on projects in SDL and Senior Design. This system is currently deployed, but there are a number of important features to add: improved data privacy, plots of the data including a smoothed version of hours contributed, summaries of the time spent on each PBI by each team member, and plots of when time was entered. In addition, several improvements need to be made for robustness. Technologies include ReactJS, and Elixir.
PO: Dr. Anne-Marie Nickel, MSOE
New project The athletic programs ensure student athletes rarely miss class. However, occasionally they must, and when that happens it is important that faculty be notified. This project's goal is to build a system to automatically generate email notifications for those occasions. The application will use information about class schedules, student athlete schedules, and athletic competition schedules (for example, https://go-raiders.com/sports/bsb/index) to automatically inform faculty when class and athletic competition conflicts occur for any student athlete enrolled in their courses. The system should accommodate for travel schedules, and it should communicate cancellations or schedule changes in competitions. The technology will be determined by the team.
PO: Faculty Member (to be determined)
New project: Most curricula at MSOE are accredited by organizations such as ABET, and part of the review process is to examine sample coursework such as graded labs and exams. Such samples are also important when faculty are being reviewed by peers and when new faculty start to teach an existing course. Because most courses are now using Canvas, it would be very useful if we could automate the process of capturing these samples. There are likely additional features such a system could provide to both reduce the time faculty spend on mechanical processes and to increase the quality of materials presented for review. This project would use the CanvasAPI to automate the capture course samples. Additional technologies would be determined by the PO and development team.
PO: Jillian Clark
Continuing project: The 2020-21 team has deployed an iOS app allowing users to interact with the Chix-4-a-Cause charity organization. This includes managing inventory and sales related to their Gifts of Love. The corresponding Android app is currently not being used; the 2021-22 project would be to redevelop and deploy the Android app.
PO: Michael Nestoras
Continuing project: A common challenge for large families and other groups is organizing gift exchanges on a budget. It would be useful to allow participants to create idea lists that could be shared and view lists of others. Lists could include items, trips, fundraisers, etc. Allowing participants to pool their money to purchase items would also be useful. This is a ReactJS project and includes both Android and iOS implementations.
PO: Dr. Rob Hasker
Continuing project: The OpComp web application supports the programming contest for high school students that is held on campus every fall. We have used a functional application for many years, but it has a dated interface that limits the number of students that can participate. Updating the interface and providing additional support for executing code would help keep students motivated and support additional students. The current system is built using Java Applets. In 2020-21, students started a redevelopment effort; this will continue in 2021-22 with a plan to deploy for fall 2022. The new platform is Angular with Typescript.
PO: MSOE IT
Continuing project: The RCAS schedule was written by an MSOE student team in 2016-2017. It has been used continually since then to allow students to sign up for advising appointments. The campus has a general policy against distributing student-built utilities for university operations, but this site has become a critical part of RCAS operations. The goal this coming year will be to make critical updates to the site to allow IT to take over operation. This project will allow the tool to come into the msoe.edu domain and further help future students be successful on campus. The technology is Ruby on Rails.
PO: Dr. Riley
Continuing project: The Rosie Dashboard project is a web-based tool that provides a visual overview of the hardware and jobs running on Rosie. The dashboard is viewable next to the datacenter in Diercks Hall and will also be eventually publicly viewable on the internet. The goal of this project is to create an accurate, reliable view for novice and expert users to understand the current state of the hardware and jobs. In this, the second year of this project, students will add additional telemetry data, a more robust "expert" view and other UI views to improve engagement for viewers. The front end is built using React, the back end is a Ruby server and uses a number of technologies including ganglia and rrdtool.
PO: Dr. Chris Taylor
Continuing project: The schedtool provides the registrar, the EECS department chair, and EECS program directors with feedback on class schedules before they go live to students during course registration. It identifies course scheduling conflicts that may lead to sections closing early leaving no valid schedules for students later in the process. The tool, developed by SDL students in the past two years, plays an important role in the schedule design process. The focus for the team in the coming academic year will be on automatically proposing variations to schedules to reduce the risk of schedule conflicts identified by the tool. The team may also explore creating a completely new schedule and expanding the metrics provided by the current system. The back end technology of this system is Python with Flask, the front end technology is React and Redux.
PO: Scott Sauer
Continuing project: Shadowrun is an extremely fun, though complicated, tabletop gaming system. While some of its competitors come with a host of electronic tools that can make the process of playing the game easier, the alternative for Shadowrun is inadequate. MSOE students have developed support for the core game over the past two years, but additional features are needed. This includes initiative passes, defense rolls, knowledge skill actions, potential mobility porting, custom pop-ups, supporting non-combat items, armor, cyber gear, magic, classes, and other features. This is a ReactJS project.
PO: Pete Reynolds
Continuing project: Up-Cycle Makerspace is about connecting schools and industry together in a mutually beneficial network to make sure no material goes to waste. Businesses often have leftover material that they don't need, and school tech classes and community makerspaces are in desperate need of extra material. This project provides a network to gather, store, and exchange material, tools, and knowledge between organizations so that everyone can get access to the things they need. In the next year, the team will introduce more resource/event/agent model features such as supporting promises and commitments. This will give people the flexibility to trade items without having to exchange money. There will also be changes to the back end to support activity hub. The front end web app is built in React with NodeJS, and connects to a Django backend through a GraphQL API.
PO: John Autero, Yaskawa America
Continuing project: Yaskawa manufactures AC Motor Drives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_drive#AC_drives) and motion control systems for manufacturing. Their training division schedules workshops on how to use this equipment at their headquarters, around the country, and and online. A previous MSOE SDL team has created a PHP web application to replace a (physical) whiteboard used for scheduling. Yaskawa is looking to integrate this application with the company's Google Calendar and their Microsoft shared drives. They are also interested in adding a number of automated checks to ensure the right resources are available for each training session. This is a web-based project implemented in PHP.
PO: Chip Pieper of ADHD America
Continuing project: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is treatable with medication, but the medication often has strong side-effects. An application has been developed that allows patients to record responses to key questions throughout the day so that medical staff can fine tune treatment methods. A number of related features need to be added to this system; a list of epics will be developed in the fall. This is a ReactJS project.
Instructor: Dr. Magaña
An additional project came to our attention after the survey was published. Dr. Schilling would like to continue the work on the Interactive Lecturer system that allows an instructor to display slides and mark on those slides during lectures. This tool often fits instructor needs better than PowerPoint. If you are interested in this project, please write it in on one of the "preferred project" lines.