IT Milk: entry

Penn State decided to give me $460 in undergraduate research funds for this spring semester. For just doing academic work, that’s more than one of my paychecks when I used to earn commission for selling tractors and lawnmowers at Sears.

As I mentioned on our IST Club website, Professor Alfredo Jimenez is working on a project to create Flash learning modules for his math students. He is publishing the software as open source for the Mathematical Association of America.

So another student and I are extending the functionality of Professor Jimenez’s program. So far, the Flash program contains a selection of math problems on Venn diagrams with problems of varying difficulty (I’ll upload an example later on).

Ultimately, my own objective is to connect the Flash program with a MySQL database so that the Professor can monitor the progress of his students from a centralized interface. The secondary objectives are to modify the structure of the math problems and to restrict the user’s access so that he must solve the problems in order of difficulty.

The other student working on the project is interested in animation, so he will give a facelift to the interface and design of the module.

This project will give me much-needed motivation to improve my programming abilities for Actionscript, PHP and MySQL.

Receiving money for a project is an attractive incentive to complete the project but it also puts a lot of pressure on me. Since the school is fronting cash for this, it leaves no room for failure. Not that this is a terribly difficult task. But would they ask for a refund?