Education Web Framework Design; User Interface Design & Software Accessibility

The relationship between my technical work and STS research primarily focused on building things with usability in mind. My STS research topic was about accessibility in software and my technical project was building a supplemental project to CS 4640. STS topics like Actor Network Theory provided an interesting approach to tackling my technical challenges and my technical project allowed me to see many of the topics we discussed in STS in action.

My technical project was building a supplemental assignment for CS 4640 with the goal of increasing students’ understanding of building web applications. It’s a project in which students develop their own web framework which will then be used to write web applications on. This pushes a unique aspect to web applications development that other courses don’t really expose and allows students to practice fundamental concepts in the Computer Science Major.

My STS research paper discussed usability and accessibility. I approached many issues people face with technology by arguing that accessibility still needs to be pushed for in application development. Using examples from the news and life as a student using education software I utilized STS topics to bring light to the challenges in accomplishing this as well as potential solutions.

Although my technical and STS projects are not strongly related, working on both simultaneously has allowed me to see STS topics in action and to understand why viewing engineering problems from the perspective of STS topics gives us an good insight. This was seen in instances of having to consider accessibility when developing my solution for the technical project and when I had to think of examples in writing my thesis.