MSIT’15 at UCA

IMG_6452_1The 8th annual MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACADEMY (MSIT) was conducted during the week of July 13-17, 2015 on the University of Central Arkansas campus. The Department of Mathematics, Department of Computer Science and the STEM INSTITUTE at UCA sponsored the event. This one-week program is designed for promising 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students in central Arkansas. This year eleven students attended the program. The main objective of the program is to stimulate and enhance interest in mathematics and its applications to computer science.

This year’s activity, Web-designing, was taught by Dr. Mark Smith, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. Brandon Ashley, a graduate student in MS Applied Mathematics provided support to Dr. Smith as well as to the students. The participants learned the most popular Web technologies and services used in building an e-commerce website. Web technologies such as HTML 5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Javascript, PHP, along with web services provided from Google and PayPal enabled students with all the tools necessary to build a complete and functional e-commerce website. Students utilized web development tools while creating their own Blog. The activity was conducted in a hands-on computer laboratory setting provided and maintained by the UCA Computer Science Department. Students used Microsoft Visual Studio Professional when developing a multimedia website that integrated images, audio, video, and animations. Students fully implemented and tested their website using Visual Studio before publishing it to a free web-hosting site that supports PHP.

The lunch time activities during the week included a visit to the UCA Planetarium, chemistry lab and a presentation on mathematics and science programs at UCA.  For more information about the future programs, please contact Dr. Ramesh Garimella at 510-450-3147 or e-mail rameshg@uca.ed.

 

 

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