Academics

STATEWARE to present semester’s efforts at end-of-school-year event

Computer science class hosts inaugural event to unveil new software

Students in the 397 CSE class, STATEWARE, will present their semester's work to faculty and industry sponsors at an event they are hosting April 30.  Credit: Penn State. Creative Commons

With four months of developing software for real-world applications now under their belt, students from the computer science class, “Students Taking Advantage of Their Education While Accelerating Research Efforts” (STATEWARE) are ready to present the culmination of this semester’s hard work to industry professionals, Penn State faculty and fellow computer science and engineering students.

The 11 STATEWARE students will host their inaugural end of semester event at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, in 112 Walker Building. They will show the data visualization interface they built to track worldwide measles statistics for Matt Ferrari, an assistant professor of biology and statistics at Penn State and a researcher in the Huck Institutes' Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. He is working with the World Health Organization to track and recommend vaccine strategies to fight a measles epidemic in West African countries, and he enlisted STATEWARE to make the data more comprehensible via user-friendly software.

The presentation is 25 percent of the students’ grade for their 397-level CSE course, which is worth 1.5 credits.

“My perspectives on the enterprise of software development, the dynamics of leadership and the way skilled workers function in a team are all radically different, and I've found it to be an incredible growing experience as a young professional in this industry,” said STATEWARE co-founder, computer science major Josh Crafts of Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

The class will conclude with a presentation on the technical aspects of the project's development and an unveiling of the first release. Sponsors from IBM, Lutron and Microsoft will be in attendance to see the results.

The STATEWARE students spent the semester creating user-friendly data visualization software for Ferrari’s epidemiology statistics. According to their professor, Steven Shaffer, a certified software quality engineer and assistant professor of computer science and engineering, the class offers a very unique opportunity to undergraduate students: building software from the ground up.

“It’s really good insight on their part,” said Shaffer about Craft and STATEWARE’S other co-founder, Dylan Fetch, an undergraduate in computer science. “Most of the time real world software engineers work on a program that already exists. In most classes, students start from scratch. The concept of STATEWARE is that the project will live on from semester to semester, and the students will have to pick up where the previous generation left off. The students in this class are very self-motivated and interested in building their own educational experience.”

Shaffer meets with the Fetch and Craft weekly to go over their project status. The two seek his insight if the class is stuck or facing a big challenge. The rest of the class writes a weekly report and turns it in to Shaffer so he can see their progress. He says not only does this class give students a chance to build software, it teaches them about advocating for themselves, a valuable skill in the workforce.

“If someone feels they have a notion of how to do something, they need to make sure they’re heard, and their idea needs to be discussed together before the group can move forward,” explained Shaffer.

Paul Jang, a junior computer science major from Broomall, Pennsylvania, who said he was intimidated by the project at the start of the class, said he’s excited to take the next level course, CSE 497, next semester, where the students will continue to enhance the program.

“Learning how to work in a group as well as the process of creating a usable and functional implementation definitely will prove beneficial to my professional career after school,” said Jang. “I'm excited to take a more senior role and to see other people go through the same learning experience that I did.”

After months of hard work, the students are eager to show off their accomplishments on April 30.

“It is important to have this event because this semester is our proof of concept. We want this program to grow to support any student who wants this experience,” said Fetch. “With more students, not only will we produce more quality software engineers, but we will advance the research efforts of the University with the software produced. We want to show our fellow students, faculty and our sponsors what we have created and what we have learned over the course of the semester.”

Last Updated April 27, 2015

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