Tamara Nelson-Fromm
PhD Student, University of Michigan Computer Science
PhD Student, University of Michigan Computer Science
Majors in the Grainger College of Engineering at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [UIUC] tend to require long chains of specific courses in order to earn a degree. While many of these required courses are common across multiple majors, the existing University Catalog and Curriculum Map listings focus only on individual courses of study. This project created a unified layout of the required courses in all Engineering majors (including Chemical Engineering in the College of Liberal Arts) at UIUC, laid out in the classical form of a metro map, where each course is a station and each major is a line. By drawing majors in a computationally generated metro map format, I sought to create a design that better portrays the prerequisite chains and courses shared between different majors.
This work represented my undergraduate thesis, and culminated in the release of a web-based interactive visualization and the writing of a technical report which I adapted for my 2022 ASEE publication.
A Metro Map-Based Curriculum Visualization for Examining Interrelated Curricula, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference, Minneapolis MN, June 2022. Nelson-Fromm, T. and Fagen-Ulmschneider, W. – Paper, Slides
Visualizing Curriculum Commonalities and Prerequisite Chains Through Metro Maps, 2020 [Virtual] Undergraduate Research Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2020. Nelson-Fromm, T. [Outstanding, top 0.5% of presentations] – Video Presentation