The Interactive
Classroom
Group 17
Executive Summary
Faculty Technical Advisor – Hongbin Li
_______________________
Sponsor La -
Group members
Oscar Rodriguez
Jonathan Lugtu
Henry Rivera
Diego Cevallos
Juan Guzman
Randy Slater
I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System.
I. Abstract
"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."
--Malcolm X
One of the most
influential technologies of the last century has been the development of the
computer. Computers were initially built for Corporate America for
business purposes. As time progressed, computers made their way into our
educational system serving as a teaching aid. The main purpose of integrating
computers and schools is to make classrooms more conducive to learning, make
instructors more efficient, and allow for more attention to individual
students.
In this day and age computers have certainly aided the classroom. Preparing
our children for a lifetime of computer use is now just as essential as
teaching them to read and write and do math. Yes, research shows that
computers in the classroom are a benefit to the educational system. We
must ask ourselves one question, have we been using computers to their maximum
capabilities? We at Educational Computer Networks (EDCN) feel that the
current educational system has not utilized the computer to its full potential.
Our product “The Interactive Classroom” is a computer network that will bridge
the gap from making the computer an occasional teaching tool to an
indispensable part of the classroom. With our product in the classroom we
will make students learn faster and better. Our product will make the
computer an essential and integral part of the classroom. It will forever
change the face of traditional education.
II. Project Status
Three weeks ago if you asked us if the project was on schedule we would say yes, but if you would ask how close we were to a finished product we would have to say less than 10 percent. Over the last three weeks our group has made great strides in getting closer to a finished project. The networking portion of our group is 80 percent done. They visited La Cordaire Academy on March 16 and have successfully configured and tested all routers and switches. They have purchased two IP address from the cable company. Jonathan has even purchased an IP address for his home for testing. The last peace of the puzzle for them is quite small. A VPN server needs to be configured to allow us to access the routers and switches remotely. We had issues with keeping our equipment in the computer room and making sure that it was safe. So, all of our equipment is back at Jonathan’s house. The whole group is going back to the Academy on March 23 to drop the Web server and VPN server off.
The web
portion of the project has come a long quite nicely and is 50 percent
done. It is significantly harder than
the networking portion. We have been
able to finally get streaming video working.
We have written a program which allows people to upload their files to
the web server for everyone to see. It
isn’t perfect just yet. We need to be
able to allow people to put protection on their files so no one can see them
and we have to be able to set a limit on the file size. This needs to be done so that someone doesn’t
upload a file that is big enough to fill up the server’s hard drive. Currently all the files are dumped into the
same directory. A process to automate
each user getting his own directory still needs to be written. We are very close to finalizing the security
for the web server. We are trying to use
attila to verify a user’s name and password.
Basically when you try to log on you would be asked for your attila user
name and password. After you enter your
user name and password our web server will check with attila to see if you have
supplied the correct information. This
was a change to our project; we initially required that the teacher manually
type in all users who were authorized to use the service. We got this idea from one of our books. It currently is not working and we honestly
have no clue why it isn’t, but we’re working on it. The main portion of the project, the ability
to ask a question interactively took a painstaking two weeks, and still is not
working properly. We keep getting these
database errors. I recently found out
that you can have the Stevens Library purchase books for you. I ordered a book on using databases from the
Stevens Library. Juan is looking into
why this thing doesn’t work. Currently
we just have parts of things finished or partially finished. There are still a couple more things to do
but we hope to wrap up our whole project by April 1.
III. Conclusion
We firmly believe in the ability of our product to change the foundation of education. The “Interactive Classroom” will provide the teacher a way to gauge if the students understand the material being taught. If the data coming back from the “Interactive Classroom” gives the teacher the impression that the students are not quite grasping the information, the teacher will be able to go over the material until he is satisfied with the data coming back from the “Interactive Classroom”. We feel this will force the students to pay more attention in class.
The “Interactive Classroom” will also stream audio and video of the teacher’s lecture allowing persons who are unable to get to class to participate fully from the comfort of their own home. We will provide a secure link to the classroom network by establishing a virtual private network. This will ensure that only those who are given access to the network can connect to it.
The Interactive Classroom will be a system that can be maintained with minimal knowledge of the products. We are confident that our “Interactive Classroom” will be in high demand because of its easy of use, stability, and potential as a learning tool.
The
group right now is ahead of schedule and should meet all of its goals. It is mostly little thins on the web side
that are slowing us down. These small
things can be solved in hours or sometimes in weeks. As a quick example you can look at our
streaming video portion. It took us two
days to get the main portion of the streaming video working, but almost a week
for we got it to get it grab the right file.
Whether we meet the deadline or not will mainly depend on our ability to
deal with small programming errors.