Matching Items (23)
Description
Education in computer science is a difficult endeavor, with learning a new programing language being a barrier to entry, especially for college freshman and high school students. Learning a first programming language requires understanding the syntax of the language, the algorithms to use, and any additional complexities the language carries. Often times this becomes a deterrent from learning computer science at all. Especially in high school, students may not want to spend a year or more simply learning the syntax of a programming language. In order to overcome these issues, as well as to mitigate the issues caused by Microsoft discontinuing their Visual Programming Language (VPL), we have decided to implement a new VPL, ASU-VPL, based on Microsoft's VPL. ASU-VPL provides an environment where users can focus on algorithms and worry less about syntactic issues. ASU-VPL was built with the concepts of Robot as a Service and workflow based development in mind. As such, ASU-VPL is designed with the intention of allowing web services to be added to the toolbox (e.g. WSDL and REST services). ASU-VPL has strong support for multithreaded operations, including event driven development, and is built with Microsoft VPL users in mind. It provides support for many different robots, including Lego's third generation robots, i.e. EV3, and any open platform robots. To demonstrate the capabilities of ASU-VPL, this paper details the creation of an Intel Edison based robot and the use of ASU-VPL for programming both the Intel based robot and an EV3 robot. This paper will also discuss differences between ASU-VPL and Microsoft VPL as well as differences between developing for the EV3 and for an open platform robot.
ContributorsDe Luca, Gennaro (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Cheng, Calvin (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Arizona State course enrollment regularly reaches triple digits. Despite the large enrollment numbers, the level of communication among students remain relatively low. Students often create Discord servers to keep in touch with classmates, but this requires each individual student to track down the invite link. The purpose of this project is to create an inviting chat service for students with minimal barriers of entry. This website, https://gibbl.io, offers a chat room for every class at ASU, making it simple for students to maintain communication.
ContributorsGarrett, Zachary (Author) / Miller, Phillip (Thesis director) / Banerjee, Ayan (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems & Operations Engineering Prgm (Contributor) / Industrial, Systems & Operations Engineering Prgm (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
A project about developing software for learning turned into a project for learning about software development. The submission here only includes the journal. However, the journal has a link to the public GitHub repository containing the source code for the thesis. The source code implements a program to facilitate self-study by allowing the user to create quizzes. The journal contains my experience working on the project (both successes and failures).
ContributorsRoper, Branden Gerald (Author) / Miller, Phillip (Thesis director) / Zazkis, Dov (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
The most important task for a beginning computer science student, in order for them to succeed in their future studies, is to learn to be able to understand code. One of the greatest indicators of student success in beginning programming courses is the ability to read code and predict its output, as this shows that the student truly understands what each line of code is doing. Yet few tools available to students today focus on helping students to improve their ability to read code. The goal of the random Python program generator is to give students a tool to practice this important skill.
The program writes randomly generated, syntactically correct Python 3 code in order to provide students infinite examples from which to study. The end goal of the project is to create an interactive tool where beginning programming students can click a button to generate a random code snippet, check if what they predict the output to be is correct, and get an explanation of the code line by line. The tool currently lacks a front end, but it currently is able to write Python code that includes assignment statements, delete statements, if statements, and print statements. It supports boolean, float, integer, and string variable types.
The program writes randomly generated, syntactically correct Python 3 code in order to provide students infinite examples from which to study. The end goal of the project is to create an interactive tool where beginning programming students can click a button to generate a random code snippet, check if what they predict the output to be is correct, and get an explanation of the code line by line. The tool currently lacks a front end, but it currently is able to write Python code that includes assignment statements, delete statements, if statements, and print statements. It supports boolean, float, integer, and string variable types.
ContributorsDiLorenzo, Kaitlyn (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Miller, Phillip (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Even in the largest public university in the country, computer related degrees such as Computer Science, Computer Systems Engineering and Software Engineering have low enrollment rates and high dropout rates. This is interesting because the careers that require these degrees are marketed as the highest paying and most powerful. The goal of this project was to find out what the students of Arizona State University (ASU) thought about these majors and why they did or did not pick them. A total of 206 students were surveyed from a variety of sources including upper level classes, lower level classes and Barrett, the Honors College. Survey questions asked why the students picked their current major, if they had a previous major and why did they switch, and if the students had considered one of the three computer related degrees. Almost all questions were open ended, meaning the students did not have multiple choice answers and instead could write as short or as long of a response as needed. Responses were grouped based on a set of initial hypotheses and any emerging trends. These groups were displayed in several different bar graphs broken down by gender, grade level and category of student (stayed in a computer related degree, left one, joined one or picked a non-computer related degree). Trends included students of all grade levels picking their major because they were passionate or interested in the subject. This may suggest that college students are set in their path and will not switch majors easily. Students also reported seeing computer related degrees as too difficult and intimidating. However, given the low (when compared to all of ASU) number of students surveyed, the conclusions and trends given cannot be representative of ASU as a whole. Rather, they are just representative of this sample population. Further work on this study, if time permitted, would be to try to survey more students and question some of the trends established to find more specific answers.
ContributorsMeza, Edward L (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Miller, Phillip (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This thesis dives into the world of artificial intelligence by exploring the functionality of a single layer artificial neural network through a simple housing price classification example while simultaneously considering its impact from a data management perspective on both the software and hardware level. To begin this study, the universally accepted model of an artificial neuron is broken down into its key components and then analyzed for functionality by relating back to its biological counterpart. The role of a neuron is then described in the context of a neural network, with equal emphasis placed on how it individually undergoes training and then for an entire network. Using the technique of supervised learning, the neural network is trained with three main factors for housing price classification, including its total number of rooms, bathrooms, and square footage. Once trained with most of the generated data set, it is tested for accuracy by introducing the remainder of the data-set and observing how closely its computed output for each set of inputs compares to the target value. From a programming perspective, the artificial neuron is implemented in C so that it would be more closely tied to the operating system and therefore make the collected profiler data more precise during the program's execution. The program is designed to break down each stage of the neuron's training process into distinct functions. In addition to utilizing more functional code, the struct data type is used as the underlying data structure for this project to not only represent the neuron but for implementing the neuron's training and test data. Once fully trained, the neuron's test results are then graphed to visually depict how well the neuron learned from its sample training set. Finally, the profiler data is analyzed to describe how the program operated from a data management perspective on the software and hardware level.
ContributorsRichards, Nicholas Giovanni (Author) / Miller, Phillip (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This research ventures to adjust the Algebra 2 Core Standards set by the Arizona Department of Education so that computer science concepts may be taught in parallel with the mathematical concepts in Algebra 2 in order to facilitate a better understanding of both subjects. The close relation to computer science and mathematics make this course possible. Students will be more prepared for university level education when they understand how technology works rather than simply how to use it. The solution is to create an online set of modules that can be taught alongside the high school mathematics course, Algebra 2. The solution contains a set of five modules that parallel with the Arizona core standards of the class. There are several obstacles that needed to be overcome in order to create online modules that would fit the needs of schools, students and teachers. This solution will reach students quickly as the hope is that it will become a requirement according to the Arizona Department of Education core standards. The course will be easily accessible to students as it is online and the course will fit into the existing education system, which would not require state laws to be passed in order to require the teaching of computer science. The goal is to bridge the gap between secondary education and college level S.T.E.M. education specifically in reference to computer science so that students start college with a strong understanding of how technology works in order to help them become more successful in the future.
ContributorsHickie, Kendall Shea (Author) / Miller, Phillip (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
For my Honors Thesis, I decided to create an Artificial Intelligence Project to predict Fantasy NFL Football Points of players and team's defense. I created a Tensorflow Keras AI Regression model and created a Flask API that holds the AI model, and a Django Try-It Page for the user to use the model. These services are hosted on ASU's AWS service. In my Flask API, it actively gathers data from Pro-Football-Reference, then calculates the fantasy points. Let’s say the current year is 2022, then the model analyzes each player and trains on all data from available from 2000 to 2020 data, tests the data on 2021 data, and predicts for 2022 year. The Django Website asks the user to input the current year, then the user clicks the submit button runs the AI model, and the process explained earlier. Next, the user enters the player's name for the point prediction and the website predicts the last 5 rows with 4 being the previous fantasy points and the 5th row being the prediction.
ContributorsPanikulam, Caleb (Author) / De Luca, Gennaro (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
The goal of this project is to measure the effects of the use of dynamic circuit technology within quantum neural networks. Quantum neural networks are a type of neural network that utilizes quantum encoding and manipulation techniques to learn to solve a problem using quantum or classical data. In their current form these neural networks are linear in nature, not allowing for alternative execution paths, but using dynamic circuits they can be made nonlinear and can execute different paths. We measured the effects of these dynamic circuits on the training time, accuracy, and effective dimension of the quantum neural network across multiple trials to see the impacts of the nonlinear behavior.
ContributorsLynch, Brian (Author) / De Luca, Gennaro (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2023-12
Description
The field of quantum computing is an exciting area of research that allows quantum mechanics such as superposition, interference, and entanglement to be utilized in solving complex computing problems. One real world application of quantum computing involves applying it to machine learning problems. In this thesis, I explore the effects of choosing different circuit ansatz and optimizers on the performance of a variational quantum classifier tasked with binary classification.
ContributorsHsu, Brightan (Author) / De Luca, Gennaro (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12