Category Archives: 2008 Projects

Creating More Interactive Learning Experiences

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Instructor: Professor Sharon McDonnell, M.D., M.P.H., Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School

Project: ECS 153 and 154 (Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health), required classes for the Masters of Public Health (MPH) graduate program at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Care Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), are being extensively redesigned. Our curricular goals are to (1) facilitate experiential learning with a more creative and personalized approach, and (2) to create a more interactive, multimedia-teaching environment that will include virtual or on-line learning options to reduce the time students are passively sitting in classrooms. By utilizing video and multimedia technology, as well as digital story-telling techniques, we aim to create a more interactive, student driven and created learning experience and explore creative and compelling methods of public health communication.

Using GIS and Spatial Analysis in the Curriculum

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Instructor: Jonathan Chipman, Departments of Geography and Earth Sciences

Project: The primary obstacles to wider adoption of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis within the curriculum include limited knowledge of and experience with this technology on the part of instructors; few good models or examples of the use of GIS in the curriculum, outside of geography courses; inherent complexity of the technology. This project is designed to address these obstacles and to help expand the use of spatial information in courses across the College. First, it will enable multiple faculty members to address specific educational goals through the development of course-specific GIS-based activities. Second, it will be broadly applicable, including courses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Third, it will provide several innovative models to demonstrate the applicability of GIS and spatial analysis in different types of courses across campus. The courses for the coming year include: GEOG 1 and GEOG 59 (Fall 2008), EARS 63 (Spring 2009).

Digital Game Studies: Surprising Ourselves

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Instructor: Aden Evens, English

Overview: This project attempts to leverage student expertise to explore creative gaming. The project calls upon students to propose experiments, to be conducted by the class, as a way of exposing the creative limits of digital gaming and possibly also expanding those limits. Funds will be used to implement these experiments, which may involve the purchase of software, memberships, materials, electronic resources, or other supplies or services essential to the experiments. Typically, an experiment in digital gaming might involve the purchase of multiple copies of a multi-player game along with multiple subscriptions (or accounts) on the game’s servers. But as the aim of this project is to take advantage of student expertise, there are no presuppositions as to what shape the experiments will take, and they might involve relatively obscure technologies (for example, a special input device), travel (to the corporate headquarters of a game development firm), contracting (of programmers or a viral marketing firm), etc.