Winter Quarter 2024
A Student-Originated Studies combining computational and agricultural sciences at the The Evergreen State College.
The schedule and resource list below will change as they are co-designed by students and faculty.
Melissa Nivala Paul Pham
Community Covenant Textbook and Resource List
Each week
- produce a piece of writing on Canvas, optionally in GitHub, describing your learning plan
- On odd weeks, you'll create an original piece of writing
- On even weeks, you'll write responses to your classmates' writing
- make a powerpoint slide describing your learning
- participate in class, give questions to facilitator
Once-per-quarter
- Co-lead a 1-hour learning activity
- can practice and work with faculty and classmates to prepare
- Facilitate one classroom discussion
- Summarize and prioritize suggestions, ask for feedback
- Make sure everyone gets a chance to speak who wishes to
- Write one section of the final project report
Monday, Organic Farmhouse 12noon-2pm Potluck and Preparation, a good time to eat and meet with our users, the farm students
Tuesday, PCC 2708 1pm-3pm Discussion, Skill- and Conversion-Building Activities
Thursday 1pm-3pm Discussion, Skill- and Conversion-Building Activities
All students will learn:
- To design and document an engineering system with sufficient detail for a later cohort of students to build, extend, and maintain the system, and update the documentation.
- To learn how to enjoy working safely in an engineering team
- To participate in a future search and holistic system design process
- To propose a Student-Originated Studies (SOS) to future faculty
Students may choose to focus on additional learning outcomes as desired
- To wire and test Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems
- including automated systems for collecting data from produce weighings and worker hours
- To program and work with single-board computers (SBCs)
- To design and work with streaming data architectures and message queues (MQTT or Apache Kafka)
- To build and maintain solar powered computation
- possibly including a solarprotocol.net node
- To host an e-commerce website for online sales of the Organic Farm's produce
- To connect with College resources including Science Instructional Technicians, the Science Support Center.
- To advocate for an electronics engineering teacher at Evergreen
(to be co-designed by students)
Introduction, individual contract design, class structure and activities, future search Electricity Safety and Basics, Multimeter, LED test, GitHub introduction
Existing farm data in Excel spreadsheets Single-Board Computers, What is an API, What is a backend
Internet access
Parts planning; where to store securely; how to check out; release forms
Estimated arrival of parts, sorting and cataloguing.
Final project presentation.
Complete the assignments above to document your learning and building. Participate in class.
Engineering students will receive up to upper division Computer Science credit with a name similar to
*4 Data Engineering for Farming
Farming students will receive up to their registered upper division credit with a name similar to
*4 Data Management for Farming
All students will be evaluated by both Paul and Melissa with a description of their achievements