Our group, C.S.D.C. (Chris, Sherman, Derrick, Chad) will be working on the project F.E.A.R.S. (Faculty Evaluation And Report System), which will improve the current system for the faculty evaluation procedures at the SIU School of Dental Medicine (SDM). Currently, faculty members turn in handwritten or typed reports, which have to be transcribed and processed. This procedure takes an incredible amount of time and effort, and our system aims to reduce that time and effort to a minimum.

Weinberg Software Productions has set forth on a great venture in cooperation with the Computer Science Department of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. They will be digitizing the current faculty evaluation system so that in the future there will be quick access to faculty reports. Blossoming out of this project will also be a new found resource in which the Computer Science Department of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will be able to compare faculty members, and also historically reference data from 1993 to present. The group is comprised of: Kent Flake, Steve Hilton, Chris Harris, and Shuli Zhai.

Dr. Robert Blain, professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, co-developed a board game with Bob Gill, Cooperation: The Wealth of Nations Game, as a teaching tool for his sociology classes. It teaches students, who are the end users of Cooperation, about the various paradigms of government and societal structure. Cooperation includes four levels of play: Barter is a simulation of a primitive economic system, Majority Rule models a socialist society, Making Money is a representation of a capitalist system and Autonomy is a blend of the best aspects of socialism and capitalism, the ideal society.

We are developing a program called C.A.P. for the SIUE Construction Department that will enable tracking concrete strength through the analysis and collation of concrete test data. Using data input from the user, the program can generate analysis reports and graphs which can be used to judge whether the concrete strength meets the required specifications.

Annually, a Maze Racer contest is held in which teams of students from universities across the nation compete, attempting to design the fastest maze navigating robot. The contest consists of two rounds. The first round is a qualification round, in which the only requirement that must be met is to get through the maze in less than 20 minutes. The second round consists of the actual competition, and is divided into two sub-phases, both of which must be accomplished within another 20 minutes. In Phase 1, the robot must go through the maze, keeping an internal map of the correct path through the maze. After completing the first phase, the vehicle must be placed back at the starting position and navigate through the maze as fast as possible, preferably using its internal map. The winning team will be whichever groups vehicle completes the second pass in the least amount of time.

One of the many tools that chemists use to determine the structure of a compound is Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) spectroscopy, which looks at the characteristics involving energy absorbed by an unpaired electron to determine structural data. However, due to natural sampling error, spectra produced of a compound by a typical ESR spectroscopy machine may not compare to what the chemist had predicted. In such cases, having a theoretically generated reference spectrum of that compound may help in determining if there is at least a trace of said compound. Moreover, theoretical spectra lend a hand in teaching the theory behind ESR spectroscopy by providing a clean example of spin resonance in a compound.