The Concord Consortium is a non profit R&D organization based in Concord, MA, dedicated to transforming education through technology. Our digital tools and learning activities capture the power of curiosity and create revolutionary new approaches to science, math and engineering education that bring out the inner scientist in everyone.
Our two Google Summer of Code students did a fabulous job this summer.
Mobile-friendly HTML5 Seismic Eruption
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Abhinav Mukherjee worked on an HTML5 version of the popular Seismic Eruption software. (The original version ran only on Windows.) He has created a client side application that pulls data from the U.S. Geological Survey and displays it both on a 2D map using leaflet and in 3D space using three.js.
The software shows a visual display of the distribution, depth and magnitude/strength of the earthquakes and eruptions, as well as popup information about the type of volcano, date of eruption and information about plate boundaries. A user can cut a cross section into the 2D map, then choose the 3D view, or adjust the time range of the data being displayed in order to focus on certain earthquakes. We look forward to embedding this software in Earth science activities for middle and high school teachers.
Data analytics for user actions in HTML5 web apps
For our educational research, we would like to be able to capture detailed logs of student actions in browser-based activities, then analyze the data in a shared tool. Peeyush Agarwal worked on the Data Analytics Log Manager, a new server-side application that makes it easier for any project to log user events and then view them using CODAP (our Common Online Data Analysis Platform).
Logs from HTML5 applications or other client-side apps (e.g. Java) can be posted to the log manager, which stores them and provides access to registered researchers. The logs can then be filtered and transformed through a variety of methods (adding calculated metadata, adding new "synthetic events" by pattern matching) before being imported into CODAP for visual analysis.
By Cynthia McIntyre, The Concord Consortium Organization Administrator
