Congratulations to the following 2024 GIANT projects awardees. These projects represent four academic departments with leadership from faculty, staff, and graduate students. Learn more about these new projects from the following abstracts. We look forward to the great outcomes that will result from these projects!
Introducing the Asphalt Road-eo at UIUC
This project seeks to initiate the Asphalt Road-eo at the University of Illinois as a student design competition focused on pavement engineering and asphalt materials. The goals of this project are to stimulate interest among undergraduate students from diverse populations in these fields and generally in graduate education and research and assess the impacts of this competition on achieving those objectives.
Team Members: Ramez Hajj (PI)
Exploring Women Engineering Students’ Gendered Internship Experiences
This project seeks to empower women engineering students through participatory action research, involving interviews and human-centered design activities to create inclusive internship resources and support programs. Spanning two phases, its goal is to amplify women's voices, drive change, and enhance internship experiences and outcomes.
Team Members: Yuting Chen (PI), Valeri Werpetinski, Leigh Deusinger, Rosie Shen, Lawrence Angrave
Developing Tools to Make Mathematics and Other STEM Contents More Accessible in College Engineering Courses
Mathematical contents in STEM courses are challenging regarding its accessibilities particularly for students with disabilities. Based on our previous success in digital content generation from lecture videos, we will develop more advanced tools to make the math equations and other STEM contents including diagrams more accessible in multiple digital formats to help all students succeed in such courses.
Team Members: Hongye Liu (PI), Lawrence Angrave Chrysafis Vogiatzis Pablo Robles Granda Victoria Shao
Fostering a Sense of Belonging in the Children of Persian-speaking Immigrants Through Multimodal and Gesture-based Language Learning Pedagogy
The TooTak project addresses the pressing need for effective Persian language learning tools for the children of Iranian immigrants living in the USA. By leveraging interactive game-based methods, it aims to enhance vocabulary, visual letter recognition, reading, and listening skills. The project's comprehensive approach includes iterative design refinement and community feedback to ensure cultural relevance and pedagogical effectiveness.
Team Members: Sharifa Sultana (PI), Sepideh Shahi, Shafagh Hadinezhad, Sourabh Garg
weSTEM Program Evaluation
The Graduate Society of Women Engineers (GradSWE) will be analyzing the impact of the annual weSTEM conference on fostering belonging among gender minority graduate students in STEM fields. The weSTEM conference By investigating career trajectories and academic experiences through mixed-methods research, the study seeks to identify factors enhancing retention and career success while providing insights for organizational best practices
Team Members: Emily Lawson-Bulten (PI), Jiachun Shi, Laura Gray
Enabling AI Learning Support for Champaign-Urbana Schools: Addressing Barriers and Promoting Equity of Access
The overarching goal of our interdisciplinary team is to create a Generative AI-based teaching assistant system for middle and high school education in the Champaign-Urbana area. In this first phase, we will assess needs, challenges, and opportunities related to implementation of Generative AI tools.
Team Members: Maryam Ghadiri (PI), Hadi Meidani, Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis, Blake Everett Johnson, Elahe Soltanaghai, Jiheng Jing