July 2019 OET Newsletter

Week of Code Turns Campers into Programmers

The Office of Educational Technology (OET) hosted 32 middle school students for our Week of Code camp from July 15 – 19.  The students learned the Processing language to program applications and a Finch robot.  Processing, based on Java, makes it easier to create animated and interactive programs.  The goal was to introduce students to a more traditional style of programming, rather than the block-based, drag-and-drop programming languages they may use initially in school.  In addition, we reinforce programming concepts by using them in both application and robotics programming.

The camp starts with simple drawing apps and robot movements, and by the final day, most students have a working game/animation and robotics code for responding to changes in the environment such as ambient light, temperature, or obstacles.  Students then present their final projects in a presentation and demo session at the end of camp for their families. This year, we were treated to many fun apps including a painting program, variations on the classic Pong game, and obstacle dodging games.

New Arc Academy Hosts Sleuths

Thirty students in 4^th-7^th grades attended the New Arc Academy camp hosted by OET from July 22-August 2.  They programed battle bots, analyzed crime scenes, and maneuvered obstacle courses with drones. This year, the camp’s focus was forensic science, and on their quest to investigate how crimes are solved, campers learned about handwriting forgeries, fingerprinting, and identifying perpetrators.  In addition, campers enjoyed visits by the state police blood splatter analysis lab, the state police bomb squad, the state police collision investigation unit, and UD’s campus public safety.

NVivo Licenses

We have a limited number of NVivo 11 or 12 licenses available for CEHD faculty and staff.  If you are interested in obtaining one of these licenses, contact OET.

Information Technologies Launches New Service Portal

Information Technologies has launched a new service management system, TeamDynamix, at services.udel.edu.  The central-IT portal will feature how-to guides, training resources, troubleshooting information, common questions, and information about problems.  A new email address, askit@udel.edu, will replace consult@udel.edu to request central IT’s services; however, IT’s central number, 831-6000, will remain the same.

As part of a second phase rollout, OET and other campus units will work with central IT to include our offerings in this system.  All CEHD and ELI staff and OET web clients should continue to complete the form at https://www.oet.udel.edu/form to request technical support from OET. Our email address remains the same, oet-help@udel.edu.

Brief OET Network Outage Scheduled

In order to keep our servers secure, there will be a brief 15-minute outage between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturday, August 3.  During this time, we will update the software running on the firewall that protects our servers in the central UD data center.  When the firewall is rebooting to apply the updates, most OET servers and services, including the H: drive, all databases, Remote Desktop servers, and all OET – hosted WordPress websites, may be unavailable for a period of up to 15 minutes.  Logging into office desktop computers that are members of the OET domain may also be slower than usual during this time.  Non-WordPress websites will not be affected by this outage.