Integrating Open Challenges in the Undergraduate Curriculum

The University of Baltimore

Contributed by Giovanni Vincenti, gvincenti@ubalt.edu

Please limit your contribution to about two pages, or 700-1000 words.

Institutional and departmental context

• Location: Baltimore, MD 21201 USA
• Undergraduate student body size: 1650 students (Fall 2021)
• Degree(s) offered: B.S. in Applied Information Technology
• Department/major name: Division of Science, Information Arts and Technologies
• Number of contributing faculty: 1 FTE, tenured
• Number of majors annually: 20 majors
• Does the department offer any graduate programs? No
• Other context: N/A

Description of Curricular Innovation

In 2018, we discovered NASA SUITS (Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students), a Student Design Challenge sponsored by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement. The Challenge asked students to envision and create an augmented reality system that may help astronauts perform their work in Space. Some students were interested in participating, so we assembled a team of 7. Most of the students were also enrolled in the Capstone experience, so the participation to NASA SUITS would count as their Capstone project. The students were selected to present their work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and lived the experience of a lifetime.

After a successful first year, other students at our institution decided to continue the works on the system that the original 7 created, so we assembled a new team. However, as part of the SUITS Design Challenge required an Outreach component, I decided to involve other students who were not directly participating to this Challenge by tailoring course assignments around the requirements of NASA SUITS. This turned into a very rewarding experience, as students were able to work on a project that had a context, a significant amount of documentation, and was just “cool.” The second team also did very well, which led to a third year of students interested in the project, and eventually a fourth.

The engagement in the course projects inspired by NASA SUITS was remarkable, and supports the inclusion of open challenges like this one in courses through project-based learning experiences. The findings were published at ACM’s SIGITE 2019 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3368308.3415407) and received the Best Paper Award. Moreover, the interest in the work dedicated to NASA SUITS has grown to include students from multiple disciplines and at multiple levels, also leading to a significant increase in diversity within the group. The solutions of our students were representative of an education that is not strictly technical, but includes a liberal arts background. Moreover, as the majority of our students are non-traditional, their work was significantly affected by their life experiences prior to coming to The University of Baltimore.

Through our participation to the SIGCSE 2022 Affiliated Event on Liberal Arts Computing Education, we would like to share how we for started with this open challenge, its integration into the courses, and overall tips and potential pitfalls when taking this approach to project-based learning. We will also introduce material from current research that focuses on open challenges in general, broadening the PBL approach to domains beyond Space exploration and to sponsors other than NASA.

Challenges/Limitations

Timing of the open challenges:

• Many challenges take place once, with little lead time to develop a course or sometimes even an assignment around the problem to be solved.
• Many challenges also are not synchronized with the academic semester, as the challenges are typically driven by a business need rather than pedagogical purposes.

Faculty involvement:

• If the students are planning to submit their solution to the sponsors of the open challenge, then the faculty member should closely review the amount of support and/or supervision that the students can receive. Some challenges do not make a difference among participants, while others explicitly labeled as Student Challenges will have stricter guidelines.
• Any help that the faculty member gives to the students may interfere with the evaluation of the submission, if the students will submit the same work for a course assignment/grade. Although we all want our students to do well (especially in highly visible, public open challenges), we have to set clear boundaries as to how much help the faculty will provide.

Unclear or changing requirements:

• Sometimes the requirements of the challenge will shift. This may depend on a series of reasons, such as the sponsors of the challenge identifies new issues, or perhaps they made some progress and need every participant to integrate such changes. In case the submission to the challenge is also going to be submitted for course credit, it is essential that either the students stick to the original requirements, or that the faculty member takes into account rapid (and sometimes drastic) changes.
• Often the open challenge is not the only project on which the sponsors are working. If the group should have any questions associated with missing or unclear requirements, getting answers may take quite a long time. This is not ideal for course projects with a short turnaround time.

Notes

I will not be able to attend in person. I contacted Amanda Holland-Minkley on December 29, 2021, who suggested that, with enough interest, there may be a virtual event.

I am interested in helping with the event report and the submission at a peer-reviewed venue.