CS3604 Case Study Library II

Examples of applied knowledge are vital to any university student looking to develop a deep and abiding understanding of their major. Such examples pour the foundation of changing the world through novel, thought provoking innovations and advancements by offering insight into how an idea can turn into a reality. This Case Study Library was developed with the purpose of providing students and others a litany of various cases in which specific Computer Science topics were relevant in industry.

Case studies, in this context, are the multimedia presentations by students of Virginia Tech in CS3604: Professionalism in Computing that take place at the end of the semester. Students are instructed to pick an example from industry pertaining to the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property, Commerce, or Privacy. Through thorough research and the learnings from the class itself, the students construct their presentations on their topic of choice.

This project is the second iteration of the Case Study Library. From the previous project group’s work, the library held more than 500 case studies by students of Professionalism in Computing. It was evident that there were some major aspects that could be improved upon. These included titling the case studies by file name, no classification of case studies by course topic, and no thumbnail images. Along with this, a significant percentage of files were unable to be displayed due to file format issues. The burden of uploading case studies was on the professor, who needed to run a Python script to batch upload site items. This iteration of the project had a solid understanding of what needed to be done, including the addition of a student upload page, stylistic corrections, search parameter specification, and thumbnail images for files. Search filtering, student authentication, collections by course topic, and functionality to upload more than one case study file were also added. Changes to the site were made via a frontend administrative page as well as making additions and modifications to the code base.

With the Case Study Library having been improved, it now stands as an effective tool that current students of Professionalism in Computing can reference while they work on their own case studies.