Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 36
Description
Forty collegiate gymnasts were recruited for a nutrition and health study. Participants must have been at least eighteen years old at Arizona State University (ASU) in the club or team gymnastics program. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviewed and accepted my survey in order to hand out to the gymnasts. The ASU club and team coach and the ASU study team also approved my survey. As soon as the survey was approved, it was emailed to all of the gymnasts. ASU gymnasts were surveyed on nutritional knowledge and personal health. Subjects answered a quiz on nutrient needs and serving sizes. Personal questions consisted of height, weight, injuries, body image, and typical meal plans. Gymnasts were given a $10 compensation to increase the participation. We found that only 16% of gymnasts surveyed scored a 70% or higher on their nutritional knowledge. Although these gymnasts do not have adequate knowledge, the majority consume a healthy diet. Diets included fruits, vegetables, protein-rich foods, and few high fat and sugary foods. Four of the gymnasts had one or fewer injuries in the past two years, although, four gymnasts also had three or more injuries. No correlation was found between diet and injuries. There was also no correlation between the gymnast's nutritional knowledge and their health.
ContributorsKugler, Natalie K. (Author) / Levinson, Simin (Thesis director) / Berger, Christopher (Committee member) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
This project's goal was to design a Central Processing Unit (CPU) incorporating a fairly large instruction set and a multistage pipeline design with the potential to be used in a multi-core system. The CPU was coded and synthesized with Verilog. This was accomplished by building on the CPU design from fundamentals learned in CSE320 and increasing the instruction set to resemble a proper Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) CPU system. A multistage pipeline was incorporated to the CPU to increase instruction throughput, or instructions per second. A major area of focus was on creating a multi-core design. The design used is master-slave in nature. The master core instructs the sub-cores where they should begin execution, the idea being that the operating system or kernel will be executing on the master core and the "user space" programs will be run on the sub-cores. The rationale behind this is that the system would specialize in running several small functions on all of its many supported cores. The system supports around 45 instructions, which include several types of jumps and branches (for changing the program counter based on conditions), arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, or, and, etc.), and system calls (for controlling the core execution). The system has a very low Clocks per Instruction ratio (CPI), but to achieve this the second stage contains several modules and would most likely be a bottleneck for performance if implemented. The CPU is not perfect and contains a few errors and oversights, but the system as a whole functions as intended.
ContributorsKolden, Brian Andrew (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The purpose of this project was to construct and write code for a vehicle to take advantage of the benefits of combining stepper motors with mecanum wheels. This process involved building the physical vehicle, designing a custom PCB for the vehicle, writing code for the onboard microprocessor, and implementing motor control algorithms.
ContributorsDavis, Severin Jan (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Vannoni, Greg (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This project was centered around designing a processor model (using the C programming language) based on the Coldfire computer architecture that will run on third party software known as Open Virtual Platforms. The end goal is to have a fully functional processor that can run Coldfire instructions and utilize peripheral devices in the same way as the hardware used in the embedded systems lab at ASU. This project would cut down the substantial amount of time students spend commuting to the lab. Having the processor directly at their disposal would also encourage them to spend more time outside of class learning the hardware and familiarizing themselves with development on an embedded micro-controller. The model will be accurate, fast and reliable. These aspects will be achieved through rigorous unit testing and use of the OVP platform which provides instruction accurate simulations at hundreds of MIPS (million instructions per second) for the specified model. The end product was able to accurately simulate a subset of the Coldfire instructions at very high rates.
ContributorsDunning, David Connor (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
The purpose of this project was to program a Raspberry Pi to be able to play music from both local storage on the Pi and from internet radio stations such as Pandora. The Pi also needs to be able to play various types of file formats, such as mp3 and FLAC. Finally, the project is also to be driven by a mobile app running on a smartphone or tablet. To achieve this, a client server design was employed where the Raspberry Pi acts as the server and the mobile app is the client. The server functionality was achieved using a Python script that listens on a socket and calls various executables that handle the different formats of music being played. The client functionality was achieved by programming an Android app in Java that sends encoded commands to the server, which the server decodes and begins playing the music that command dictates. The designs for both the client and server are easily extensible and allow for any future modifications to the project to be easily made.
ContributorsStorto, Michael Olson (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
A key component to American weddings is the wedding cake and the number of customs associated with it. The History, Evolution, and Development of Wedding Cakes is a creative project that hopes to answer why the wedding cake is such an iconic item and what it represents. A historical study details the evolution from its origin to present day while a comparison of wedding cakes (or wedding cake analogs) from other cultures explores their role(s) across the globe. It was found that while little regard is given to the symbolism of the wedding cake today, its presence persists in some shape or form as it continues to evolve. Cultural variations were recreated to reflect personal interpretations of contemporary designs in addition to an original design of a contemporary-rustic American wedding cake.
ContributorsYung, Andra (Author) / Levinson, Simin (Thesis director) / Jacobs, Mark (Committee member) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Image stabilization is a highly desired feature for many systems involving cameras. A camera stabilizer effectively prevents or compensates for unwanted camera movement to provide this stabilization. The use of stabilized camera technology on board aerial vehicles is one such application where the stabilization can greatly improve the overall capability of the system. The requirements for such a system include a continuous control algorithm and hardware to determine and adjust the camera orientation. The topic of developing an aerial camera control and electronic stabilization system is thus explored in the contents of this paper.
ContributorsJauregui, Joseph (Co-author) / Brown, Steven (Co-author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Hansen, Mark (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The purpose of this project was to create a modular embedded systems platform that would provide a hands-on lab experience for students learning about embedded systems protocols. The system would be designed to be modular, expandable, and productizable. Its modularity would eliminate errors in the design and make the entire system more robust. It would also be expandable, which means additional project boards could be created in the future without requiring a complete redesign of the system. And finally, productizing the entire system would allow it to be sold to other universities who may have a similar program that would benefit from a system such as the OCTOPUS.
ContributorsDavis, Mareike (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Vannoni, Greg (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
The Coffee Hutch project is derived from the field of Computer Science and consists of a website, a database, and a mobile application for Android devices. This three-tiered scheme is designed to support a point-of-sale payment system to be integrated with a standalone product dispensing machine. The website contains landing pages which provide navigation and functional capabilities for users. The site also features a variety of PHP web services which communicate with the database using SQL commands. The application, programmed in the Java language, makes use of these services in a simple, utilitarian design aimed at modification of user data stored in the database. This database, developed with MySQL and managed with the phpMyAdmin application, contains limited information in order to maximize speed of read and write accesses from the website and Android app. Together, these three components comprise an effective payment management system model with mobile capabilities. All of the components of this project were built at no cost. The website hosting service is free and the third-party services required (such as Paypal payment services) are simulated. These simulations allowed me to demonstrate the functionality of the three-tiered product without the necessity for monetary supplication. This thesis features every aspect of the development and testing of The Coffee Hutch software components. Requirements for each function of the software are specified in one section, and they are aligned with various pieces of the code in the source documentation. Test cases which address each requirement are outlined in another section of the thesis.
ContributorsHutchison, Caleb Ryan (Author) / Burger, Kevin (Thesis director) / Zhao, Ming (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Nutritional support offered before and during chemotherapy treatment is proven to improve the outcomes of treatment (Bernhardson, 2016). This project seeks to examine current forms of nutritional support offered to patients, as well as the models of care and support teams in cancer treatment centers. The basis for this project incorporated personal experiences at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Gilbert, Arizona as well as research into the work of clinical oncology dietitians. An intense interest in food videos and blogs also informed this project, and was incorporated in the hope of providing chemotherapy patients a platform to discover recipes specific to their unique situation. The combination of this research was utilized to create several videos which demonstrated specific recipes beneficial for patients as well as creating a platform for this particular population. While nutritional support can take multiple forms, the focus of nutritional support surrounds symptom management. The common side effects of chemotherapy such as nausea, mucositis (mouth sores), and extreme weight loss were taken into account. Recipes were formulated to directly address these conditions and each recipe was broken down into the benefits of both macronutrients and micronutrients. In addition to formulating specific recipes and videos, barriers to proper nutritional support were examined and explained. These barriers include understaffing of clinical dietitians at cancer treatment centers, a patient's lack of transportation to and from treatments, as well as an overwhelming viewpoint that nutritional support is only required for extreme cases of malnutrition. Combatting these barriers and offering more forms of nutritional support will help to increase a patient's positive response to treatment, manage their symptoms, and improve their overall quality of life.
ContributorsMonteilh, Christina Eleanor (Author) / Levinson, Simin (Thesis director) / Martinelli, Sarah (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12