Campus map design wins competition

After more than a month of idea development, a graduate student team’s campus walk map took first place in the IU Student Association co-sponsored case competition.

The campus walk map would serve students by incorporating information about walkways on campus, including shortcuts such as paths in the Arboretum or Dunn’s Woods.

Much like the Google mapping event IUSA sponsored last month, the winning case competition idea would help students and campus visitors more easily navigate campus.

One main difference, however, is that the technology would be on an IU server and not operated through an outside company, said Justin Peters, first place team winner and a graduate student in information science.

Peters teamed with Paul Rohwer, a graduate student in computer science, for the competition. They estimated they spent a combined 40-50 hours of work on the project, from doing research to interviewing resources to building a working prototype of the walk map.

The two found out they took first place Nov. 9, the same day a team co-led by Lindsay Thompson, a senior informatics major, learned it took second.

“The big reason why we wanted to do it was because the case competition would set more strict deadlines for us on our capstone project,” Thompson said.

The team developed a sustainability dashboard that would be accessible online and display metrics regarding the University’s resource use, such as water and electricity consumption. Their plan would also include a student dashboard, where students could log in to view their own personal consumption habits.

Though Thompson and her teammates Sarah Wever and Polly Chang, both senior informatics majors, came in second, they will still pursue their idea, Thompson said, as their capstone project. The team will receive $750, which Thompson said she will apply toward replacing many things she lost in the Terra Trace apartments fire in
October.

IUSA co-sponsored the competition with University Information Technology Services and the Office of Sustainability. Open to both undergraduate and graduate student teams, the mission of the competition was to create “a tool, system, or process that aids students, facilities and staff in living and working sustainably on campus through sustainable computing,” according to the competition handbook.

Teams addressed at least one of three content areas: reducing the environmental impact of IT at IU, leveraging IT for campus-wide sustainability gains and capturing and presenting metrics about campus sustainability.

“We’re not only reducing our environmental impact by encouraging people to walk more, but we’re harnessing the power of the servers we already host,” Peters said of his team’s idea.

A first round of competition, ending Oct. 10, narrowed the field to three teams. Those three teams were then responsible for developing prototypes of their ideas and giving a 15-minute presentation to the judging panel made up of eight members from organizations such as UITS, IUSA and the Office of Sustainability.

Ben Calvin, senior and logistics director for the Office of Sustainability who served as a judge in the final round of judging, said all three of the finalists offered excellent proposals, but there were differences between them.

“They were all pretty well developed and had done a great amount of background research,” Calvin said. “I think, in the end, it was about the final vision being not only very clear but also within reach.”

Idea feasibility and practicality were aspects IUSA stressed from the start of the competition, and ultimately it was the first place team’s idea that proved strongest in future usability, Calvin said.

Thompson and her teammates were initially disappointed by their second place finish, she said, but they have gotten a lot out of the competition.

“I had never competed in a case competition before, and neither had my teammates, so it was an experience that we were really happy to have in our undergrad experience,” she said. “It’s an experience that I think all informatics (students) should do to really hone their skills. It forced us to compete, so it made our project a lot better.”

Peters and Rohwer, who won $1,500 in prize money, are looking forward to the next step in the project, they said.

“I hope it gets applied to not only IU Mobile, but that it gets used on a variety of applications, so it’s not just a one-trick pony,” Peters said.

Current plans will have Peters and Rohwer’s work eventually integrated with the IU Mobile app, they said.

Rohwer’s hope centers around the students who will one day use the
application.

“I hope that pedestrians on campus become first-class citizens instead of cars.”