Effective Use Of Group Projects In Online Learning

Group projects have long been used in face-to-face instruction to improve cognitive learning among its students.  Group projects not only provide practical experience and allow students to practice the concepts they have learned, but also teach the students creative construction and group dynamics.  As important as group projects have proven in conventional learning, they are rarely used in online education courses.  This paper examines the foundations of effectively using group projects, and then demonstrates how to integrate them into online learning courses

The Death of Thorild Wulff

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LunarWSN Node - A Wireless Sensor Network Node Designed for In-Situ Lunar Water Ice Detection

In this paper, we present a fully functional cubic sensor node prototype designed to be ballistically deployed from a rover or lander to regions of interest that might be unsafe or impractical for rovers or landers to reach. Unlike helicopters or drones, this system can be deployed in airless environments. Crucially, the nodes are equipped with wireless ranging and wireless communications capabilities, such that each node can be localized by leveraging wireless ranging with triangulation, and a cluster of deployed nodes form an expandable WSN (Wireless Sensor Network), that we term LunarWSN. The hardware redundancy of the network can reduce the chance of failure. Each node is a light (\u3c170g), miniaturized (5cm×5cm×5cm), modular design, that allows sensor payloads to be customized to different scientific missions. As a representative case study, the node described in this paper is equipped with an impedance sensor designed to measure the permittivity of the lunar soil, which infers water content. With the help of LunarWSN, more in situ measurement results can be obtained to acquire meter-scale-resolution knowledge of lunar resource distribution and dynamic phenomena

Ecological Dualisms Undone: Exploring The Roles Of Ideologies, Zero Waste, And Qualitative Life-Cycle Analysis In Punta Cana'S Building Material Culture

Materials, as the physical human-environment interface, are key challenges and requirements for sustainable design. This study investigates the epistemology of building materials to understand the considerations and consequences of material selection, both in and within the specific context of Punta Cana. By employing reflective research methods to interpret six environmental building philosophies, this study reveals the building community's need to resolve inflexible dualisms regarding technology, globalization, and cultural meaning to overcome professional divisions that hinder interventions toward sustainability. The results call for common goals, such as zero waste, to explore a wider range of suitable building solutions and provide unified sustainable design criteria. Finally, a qualitative life-cycle analysis suggests that bamboo, a building material commonly disregarded by dualistic mindsets, may convey more environmental, economic, and social benefits in Punta Cana than concrete, the prevailing Dominican structural building material. The conclusions of this study call for increased criticism and ethics throughout the design process to avoid misleading assumptions, represent implicated stakeholders, and promote context-based building solutions. Keywords: sustainable materials, environmental philosophy, zero waste, vernacular, bamboo, Dominican Republi

The stratigraphy and paleontology of the Devonian system in Rock Island County, Illinois

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Illinois, 1912.Typescript.Includes bibliographical references.Ope

A Swarm Robotic Approach to Inspection of 2.5 D Surfaces in Orbit

Robotic inspection offers a robust, scalable, and flexible alternative to deploying fixed sensor networks or humaninspectors. While prior work has mostly focused on single robot inspections, this work studies the deployment of a swarm ofinspecting robots on a simplified surface of an in-orbit infrastructure. The robots look for points of mechanical failure and inspectthe surface by assessing propagating vibration signals. In particular, they measure the magnitude of acceleration they sense ateach location on the surface. Our choice for sensing and analyzing vibration signals is supported by the established position ofvibration analysis methods in industrial infrastructure health assessment. We perform simulation studies in Webots, a physicsbased robotic simulator, and present a distributed inspection algorithm based on bio-inspired particle swarm optimization andevolutionary algorithm niching techniques to collectively localize an a priori unknown number of mechanical failure points. Toperform the vibration analysis and obtain realistic acceleration data, we use the ANSYS multi-physics simulation software andmodel mechanical failure points as vibration sources on the surface. We deploy a robot swarm comprising eight robots of 10-cmsize that use a bio-inspired inchworming locomotion pattern. The swarm is deployed on 2.5D (that is curved 2D) cylindricalsurfaces with and without obstacles to investigate the robustness of the algorithm in environments with varying geometric complexity. We study three performance metrics: (1) proximity of the localized sources to their ground truth locations, (2) time tolocalize each source, and (3) time to finish the inspection task given an 80% surface coverage threshold. Our results show thatthe robots accurately localize all the failure sources and reach the coverage threshold required to complete the inspection. Thiswork demonstrates the viability of deploying robot swarms for inspection of potentially complex 3D environments.<br/