Purdue University Graduate School
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EXPLORATION OF NOVEL EDUCATIONAL TOOLS BASED ON VISUALIZATION

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posted on 2022-08-02, 18:14 authored by Abel Andres Reyes AnguloAbel Andres Reyes Angulo
The dynamic on how teaching is performed has changed abruptly in the past few years. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, class modalities were changing. Instructors were adopting new modalities for lectures, like online and hybrid classes, and the use of collaborative resources were getting more popular over time. The current situation was just a catalyst of an event that was already started, which is the beginning of a new era for education.

This new education era implies new areas of study and the implementation of tools that promote an efficient learning process by adapting to everything involved in this change. Sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics education (STEM) and healthcare fields are areas with noticeable demand for professionals in industry around the world. Therefore, the need to have more people academically prepared in these areas is highly prioritized. New tools to be used for learning to complement the mentioned field must show features related to the adoption of new technologies as well as the fact that this is currently a digital era. Emergent specialities like artificial intelligence and data science are traditionally being taught at the university level, due to the complexity of some concepts and the background needed to develop skills related to these areas. However, with the current technology available, tools can be used as complementary learning resources for complex subjects. Visualization helps the users to learn by sharpening the sense of sight and making evident things that are hard to illustrate by words or numbers. Therefore, the use of software for education based on visualization could be the new tools needed for these emergent specialities aligned to this new educational era. Features like intractability, gaming, and multimedia resources can help to make these tools more robust and completed.

In this work, the implementations of novel educational tools based on visualization for emergent specialization areas like machine learning in STEM and pathophysiology in heathcare were explored. This work summarizes the implementation of three different projects to illustrate the general purpose of this work, showing the relevance of the mentioned areas and proposes educational tools based on visualization, adapting the proposal for each speciality and having in mind different target populations. The projects related to each of the proposed tools includes the analysis to elaborate the content within the tool, the review of the software development, and the testing sessions to identify strengths and weaknesses of the tools. The tools are intended to be designed as frameworks in such a way that the deliverable content could be customized over the time and cover different educational needs.

History

Degree Type

  • Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering

Campus location

  • Hammond

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Colin Elkin

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee co-chair

Xiaoli Yang

Additional Committee Member 2

Quamar Niyaz