UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In its pilot semester, one computer science course challenges self-motivated students to develop software for a real-world application.
STATEWARE, which stands for “Students Taking Advantage of Their Education While Accelerating Research Efforts,” is the brainchild of two juniors in computer science and engineering, Dylan Fetch and Joshua Crafts.
The class gives students an opportunity to pair up with researchers in the area and collaborate on large-scale projects.
Fetch, of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Crafts, of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, got the idea for STATEWARE when they realized a lot of researchers are looking for software.
“It’s hard to do big projects in class,” Crafts said. “This gives us hands-on experience in a way not found in the classroom.”
After hearing pitches from four different researchers, Fetch and Crafts chose to work with Matt Ferrari for their pilot program.
Ferrari is an assistant professor of biology at Penn State “investigating local and regional dynamics of annual measles epidemics in West African countries in order to recommend vaccination strategies to minimize mortality and morbidity due to measles,” according to his website.
STATEWARE plans to help Ferrari systematize his research on the deadly disease.
Eleven students are enrolled in the class this semester, including Fetch and Crafts. Each founder is leading a team to develop a data visualization platform for trends associated with the measles virus around the world.
“It just seemed like the perfect project for us,” Crafts said. “It's exactly what we were looking for.”
Fetch said the partnership will do a lot for Ferrari as well.
Before the project, Ferrari compiled his data on spreadsheets. For each spreadsheet, 193 rows each represent a country of the world. Corresponding columns represent every year from 1980 to present.
“Right now if the World Health Organization wants to compare two countries, they have to go in and pick out the data set they want and plot it,” Fetch said. “Instead we’re going to have all of the information in a database and world map so that if you click on a country, you can bring up graphs of all of the data you want.”
Crafts said this method is much more transparent and accessible than having the raw data alone.
The final program, which will have its first release at the end of the semester, will be used by the World Health Organization to inform global vaccine deployment policy.
From club to classroom
STATEWARE started out as a club, but Fetch and Crafts recognized that the program would ultimately be unsuccessful as an extracurricular.
“People have tried this before,” Fetch said. “The main issue is that once classes start stacking up, people start giving less attention to clubs.”
Incorporating class credit gives students an incentive to work hard on the projects without feeling too overwhelmed.
Member Andrew Lopreiato said most computer science classes couldn’t teach what it is like to have a set of requirements, a development timeline and a team to work with. A typical class focuses only on the theory of algorithms and how to make a program work – STATEWARE helps fill those gaps in knowledge.
“This isn't an assignment that you hand in and get a grade, and you're done,” he said. “This class is building a project that people will be using, and that is my favorite part of it.”
STATEWARE member William Bittner said the program is a great platform for learning how to work as a team.
“I have improved my ability to work in a team atmosphere as a direct result of this class,” he said. “It's simply icing on top of the cake that at the end of this learning experience we will have developed software that not only matters, but helps make the world a safer place.”
Help from corporate sponsors IBM, Lutron Electronics Co. and Microsoft also allows STATEWARE to bring in guest speakers to “engage with the real world.”
“We’re trying to have the support from them so we can afford to do some things we wouldn’t be able to do on our own,” Crafts said. “Sponsors send representatives so students can get their perspectives on software development.”
Penn State’s student chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) also supports STATEWARE.
“ACM absorbed us as a club so that we didn't have to start out with nothing, and we are still supported by them,” Fetch said.
The STATEWARE team credits Penn State professors Steven Shaffer and Stephen Fast with encouraging their idea. Their support helped turn the budding notion into an established university course worth 1.5 credits.
Fast introduced them to some researchers who had needs for software, introduced them to people in local entrepreneurial community who do software for a living and offered suggestions from his own experience in developing software and running a company.
“The thing that has really made this successful so far is that people have really believed in the idea,” Crafts said. “People have been willing to do things to make this happen.”
Shaffer said he was happy to help students who were taking charge of their academic careers.
"I think it's great to see some students being proactive in preparing for their lives as software developers,” he said. “This is why I was glad to volunteer to be the faculty point person for the group."
Fast, who is still involved with the program and attends its weekly meetings, said the communication between the researchers and students can allow them achieve more than either group ever imagined.
“It’s a really nice mixture between doing good for the benefit of Penn State and providing the students with some real work lessons that will be extra valuable for them in their careers,” Fast said.
With Shaffer’s and Fast’s help, STATEWARE transformed from a branch of ACM into its own course, in which students are encouraged to enroll multiple times.
“We envision students will be taking this class for more than one semester,” Crafts said.
Fetch said software designers often pick up their work on a project where someone else left off.
“One of the things we really want to emphasize with the class is that you have to document your software well,” Fetch noted. “That way when you hand it off to someone else, they can read the documentation and know how to pick up where you left off.”
Crafts said this is a valuable skill that students don’t often get in classes.
“When you turn in an assignment for class, you don’t go back to it,” he said. “You don’t have to live with your mistakes.”
Although STATEWARE students will embark on a unique project with each new semester, they will continue to revisit older projects and make improvements.
Despite its sponsors and university credit, STATEWARE is very student-driven. Fetch and Crafts have overall creative control.
"It's great for us,” Crafts said. “We want our students to feel like they’re in control of the product that they’re making.”
Fast said he envisions a promising future for this program.
“I’m impressed because I know how much work it takes and how many lessons they’ve learned the hard way,” Fast said. “This group of students is probably giving a lot more effort than the credit hours assigned to them, and as a result they’re accomplishing a lot.”