Effective communication and engineering are not a natural pairing. The incongruence is because engineering students are focused on making, designing and analyzing. Since these are the core functions of the field there is not a direct focus on developing communication skills. This honors thesis explores the role and expectations for student engineers within the undergraduate engineering education experience to present and communicate ideas. The researchers interviewed faculty about their perspective on students' abilities with respect to their presentation skills to inform the design of a workshop series of interventions intended to make engineering students better communicators.

Optical Communications are at a high point of interest by the space engineering community. After successful projects like the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD), NASA has become interested in augmenting their current Deep Space Network (DSN) with optical communication links. One such link is Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) which will be launching with the Psyche mission. To gain a full understanding of the advantages of this network, this thesis will go over the history and benefits of optical communications both on Earth and in space. This thesis will then go in depth on NASAs DSOC project through an algorithmic implementation of the communications channel.

Intelligence is a loosely defined term, but it is a quality that we try to measure in humans, animals, and recently machines. Progress in artificial intelligence is slow, but we have recently made breakthroughs by paying attention to biology and neuroscience. We have not fully explored what biology has to offer us in AI research, and this paper explores aspects of intelligent behavior in nature that machines still struggle with.

The functional programming paradigm is able to provide clean and concise solutions to many common programming problems, as well as promote safer, more testable code by encouraging an isolation of state-modifying behavior. Functional programming is finding its way into traditionally object-oriented and imperative languages, most notably with the introduction of Java 8 and in LINQ for C#. However, no functional programming language has achieved widespread adoption, meaning that students without a formal computer science background who learn technology on-demand for personal projects or for business may not come across functional programming in a significant way. Programmers need a reason to spend time learning these concepts to not miss out on the subtle but profound benefits they provide. I propose the use of a video game as an environment in which learning functional programming is the player's goal. In this carefully constructed video game, learning functional programming is the key to progression. Players will be motivated to learn and will be given an immediate chance to test and demonstrate their understanding. The game, named Lambda Starship (stylized as (lambda () starship)), is a 3D first-person video game. It takes place in a spaceship that, due to extreme magnetic interference, has lost all on-board software while leaving the hardware completely intact. The player is tasked to write software using functional programming paradigms to replace the old software and bring the spaceship back to a working state. Throughout the process, the player is guided by an in-game manual and other descriptive resources. The game is implemented in Unity and scripted using C#. The game's educational and entertainment value was evaluated with a study case. 24 undergraduate students at Arizona State University (ASU) played the game and were surveyed detailing their experience. During play, user statistics were recorded automatically, providing a data-driven way to analyze where players struggled with the concepts introduced in the game. Reception was neutral or positive in both the entertainment and educational sides of the game. A few players expressed concerns about the manual in its form factor and engagement value.

As our relationship with technology continues to encourage people to spend more time engaged online, traditional means of journalism must adapt in order to communicate with audiences. While many news organizations default to social media outlets, the goal of this project is to allow users a more direct experience with reporters, photographers and editors. It will allow The State Press, the official, student-run news organization covering ASU, to create content within Slack, an internal messaging platform commonly used in newsrooms. Secondly, it will provide a means for viewers to conveniently ingest their news as it unfolds, with updates, media, and analysis appearing in front of them without having to refresh the page.

In this project, the use of deep neural networks for the process of selecting actions to execute within an environment to achieve a goal is explored. Scenarios like this are common in crafting based games such as Terraria or Minecraft. Goals in these environments have recursive sub-goal dependencies which form a dependency tree. An agent operating within these environments have access to low amounts of data about the environment before interacting with it, so it is crucial that this agent is able to effectively utilize a tree of dependencies and its environmental surroundings to make judgements about which sub-goals are most efficient to pursue at any point in time. A successful agent aims to minimizes cost when completing a given goal. A deep neural network in combination with Q-learning techniques was employed to act as the agent in this environment. This agent consistently performed better than agents using alternate models (models that used dependency tree heuristics or human-like approaches to make sub-goal oriented choices), with an average performance advantage of 33.86% (with a standard deviation of 14.69%) over the best alternate agent. This shows that machine learning techniques can be consistently employed to make goal-oriented choices within an environment with recursive sub-goal dependencies and low amounts of pre-known information.

The spread of fake news (rumors) has been a growing problem on the internet in the past few years due to the increase of social media services. People share fake news articles on social media sometimes without knowing that those articles contain false information. Not knowing whether an article is fake or real is a problem because it causes social media news to lose credibility. Prior research on fake news has focused on how to detect fake news, but efforts towards controlling fake news articles on the internet are still facing challenges. Some of these challenges include; it is hard to collect large sets of fake news data, it is hard to collect locations of people who are spreading fake news, and it is difficult to study the geographic distribution of fake news. To address these challenges, I am examining how fake news spreads in the United States (US) by developing a geographic visualization system for misinformation. I am collecting a set of fake news articles from a website called snopes.com. After collecting these articles I am extracting the keywords from each article and storing them in a file. I then use the stored keywords to search on Twitter in order to find out the locations of users who spread the rumors. Finally, I mark those locations on a map in order to show the geographic distribution of fake news. Having access to large sets of fake news data, knowing the locations of people who are spreading fake news, and being able to understand the geographic distribution of fake news will help in the efforts towards addressing the fake news problem on the internet by providing target areas.

This mobile application development sought to accomplish three goals: learning mobile development, addressing a real world problem, and applying four years of schooling towards a structured project. These goals were each chosen for individual reasons. Firstly, the mobile platform is the most effective way to reach the maximal amount of users. The majority of the first-world populous owns a smartphone and spends a reasonable amount of time using them through a multitude of purposes such as scheduling, conversation, and entertainment. Coupled with the lack of personal experience in this development area, it becomes evident that creating a mobile application was the most desirable choice for this project. Secondly, after hearing stories and reflections from my peers about their own humanitarian endeavors, their experiences sparked a desire to utilize this project as an opportunity to also create an impact. Thus, this project began to address the desire to solve a real world problem. Lastly, the first three years of the software engineering curriculum has been focused primarily on theoretical environments and projects. Most of these projects seemed to have no real world transferability. Therefore, having spent the time and effort to learn proper methods of software development, it would be remiss not to use these skills to train for future employment. This thesis began with a motivation to solve the time-consuming problem of finding health facilities that satisfy financial, insurance, and health needs. Two personal accounts of delayed proper medical services will be expanded upon later in this document. These experiences served as inspiration to delve further into the problem and determine if there was a solution to solve it. After months of exploring and planning, the project hit an impassible roadblock that deemed the project could no longer be continued. Within the remaining time constraints, changing the development area was not a viable solution to accomplish the intended goal. Thus, a new idea was conceived to assist those trying to cope with anxiety in today's world. One of the common recommendations for people suffering from anxiety is to write down their troubles with the intention of reflecting on them at a later point. This serves as a method to reason through the irrationality, enabling individuals to identify repetitive patterns over long periods of time. Physically writing down these reflections with pen and paper is no longer sufficient in this technological era. This is especially true for those wanting to retain their privacy or those without enough drive to consistently use this technique. The remaining months of this thesis were directed at planning and creating a prototype to address this.

Many organizational course design methodologies feature general guidelines for the chronological and time-management aspects of course design development. Proper course structure and instructional strategy pacing has been shown to facilitate student knowledge acquisition of novel material. These course-scheduling details influencing student learning outcomes implies the need for an effective and tightly coupled component of an instructional module. The Instructional Module Development System, or IMODS, seeks to improve STEM, or ‘science, technology, engineering, and math’, education, by equipping educators with a powerful informational tool that helps guide course design by providing information based on contemporary research about pedagogical methodology and assessment practices. This is particularly salient within the higher-education STEM fields because many instructors come from backgrounds that are more technical and most Ph.Ds. in science fields have traditionally not focused on preparing doctoral candidates to teach. This thesis project aims to apply a multidisciplinary approach, blending educational psychology and computer science, to help improve STEM education. By developing an instructional module-scheduling feature for the Web-based IMODS, Instructional Module Development System, system, we can help instructors plan out and organize their course work inside and outside of the classroom, while providing them with relevant helpful research that will help them improve their courses. This article illustrates the iterative design process to gather background research on pacing of workload and learning activities and their influence on student knowledge acquisition, constructively critique and analyze pre-existing information technology (IT) scheduling tools, synthesize graphical user interface, or GUI, mockups based on the background research, and then implement a functional-working prototype using the IMODs framework.

Currently, students at Arizona State University are restricted to cards when using their college's local currency. This currency, Maroon and Gold dollars (M&G), is a primary source of meal plans for many students. When relying on card readers, students risk security and convenience. The security is risked due to the constant student id number on each card. A student's identification number never changes and is located on each card. If the student loses their card, their account information is permanently compromised. Convenience is an issue because, currently, students must make a purchase in order to see their current account balance. Another major issue is that businesses must purchase external hardware in order to use the M&G System. An online or mobile system would eliminate the need for a physical card and allow businesses to function without external card readers. Such a system would have access to financial information of businesses and students at ASU. Thus, the system require severe scrutiny by a well-trusted team of professionals before being implemented. My objective was to help bring such a system to life. To do this, I decided to make a mobile application prototype to serve as a baseline and to demonstrate the features of such a system. As a baseline, it needed to have a realistic, professional appearance, with the ability to accurately demonstrate feature functionality. Before developing the app, I set out to determine the User Interactions and User Experience designs (UI/UX) by conducting a series of informal interviews with local students and businesses. After the designs were finalized, I started implementation of the actual application in Android Studio. This creative project consists of a mobile application, a contained database, a GUI (Graphics User Interface) prototype, and a technical document.