Students Win STEM App Challenge with Mobile Application, "Real Ball"

By Kari Fox

A group of three students received first place in the STEM App Challenge with their application that helps learners overcome common physics misconceptions. Yu Qiao, Martin Keegan and Lingchen Xiong developed the winning Android application, “Real Ball-” in Rajiv Ramnath’s Advanced Mobile Application Development class.

The competition, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Center, challenged students to develop an application that can be used as a learning tool to help learners overcome common misconceptions they may have in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Real Ball targets misconceptions about physics, such as velocity and acceleration.

“For example, one misconception is that acceleration always occurs in the direction of the objects motion,” says Martin Keegan, an undergraduate student majoring in computer and information science. “In one level, this misconception is challenged as the goal is to have the ball be accelerating in one direction as it is moving in the opposite direction.”

Real Ball users can roll a digital ball by tilting the phone screen and try to reach a goal on each of the six levels, which the designers hope will eliminate users’ sometimes false conceptions about velocity and acceleration by experiencing it themselves. And after completing a level, the user can view a graph of both the ball’s velocity and its acceleration over time.

To form the idea, the group looked at a list of problems people commonly have with understanding various areas of science.

“We brainstormed and tossed ideas back and forth and decided which one could translate into a game or app,” says Keegan. “After seeing the misconceptions having to do with physics, we decided a physics based game would work best.”

Prior to the project, the students had never worked with Android development.

“Not only are we learning this technology from scratch, but we are creating this app simultaneously,” says Keegan. “There were many alterations that had to be done and many tweaks that had to be made.”

Another challenge the students faced concerned programming.

“I am sure all programmers know what I am talking about when I say things never go completely smoothly,” says Keegan. “Parts of code will just randomly not work or break and you need to figure out why and there were a lot of small details to tweak to get things running well, especially considering we were making a game and it had to feel like it was responsive and working smoothly.”

But through their hard work and dedication, the team was able to complete the application in just ten short weeks. The teammates credit a lot of their success to professors, Rajiv Ramnath, associate professor of computer science and engineering; Dean Cristol, associate professor of education; and Andrew Heckler, associate professor of physics.

“Dr. Ramnath was the first person to teach me Android development and genuinely wanted to help his students,” says Keegan. “Dr. Dean Cristol and Dr. Andrew Heckler also came into class to provide feedback on all of our apps. It was really valuable and we ended up incorporating it into our app and its functionality.”

The students’ work ethic is what Ramnath believes helped them obtain the win.

“All groups performed admirably,” says Ramnath. “They were motivated and engaged throughout the whole semester.”

Ramnath says he thinks the Real Ball application won for a number of reasons.

“I believe it was a winner because it is clear and simple in concept, easy to use, and delivered on the learning outcomes,” Ramnath says.

The team believes another reason for the win lay in the app’s originality.

“I think our end result this quarter was an intuitive, clean, polished, well done app,” says Keegan. “On top of these things, I think we had a really unique and cool idea.”

Students in the class were loaned smartphones by AT&T to use for the projects.

Kari Fox is a student communications assistant with the College of Engineering.