Sponsored by the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative and the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, this year’s DLAC Teaching With Technology Fair features a wide range of digital projects.
RSVP for the Teaching with Technology Fair on December 8 from 12-1 PM at https://grinnell.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1AYrAlqCnTizpGJ.
CATPAW: Computer-Aided Thinking, Primarily about Writing
Erik Simpson (English)
CATPAW is an interactive resource intended to help students examine their own writing stylistically to make informed decisions about, for example, choosing active verbs or varying the length of sentences.
Co-designing Software Products: A Learning by Doing Approach in Studying Software Development
Priscilla Jimenez (Computer Science) & Raj Jhanwar ’25
CSC324, the software development and design course, combines learning software engineering principles by engaging students in the different phases of software development. Students start by developing a web-based interactive data visualization while learning to code in a new programming language. Then, students work in small groups co-designing software with community partners (from GC or non-profit organizations outside GC).
Digital Pedagogies of Spanish Detective Fiction
Nick Phillips (Spanish), Tierney Steelberg (DLAC), Mikey O’Connor ’24, & Krista Spies ’24
The goal of this project is to create digitally inflected lesson plans and assignments to accompany upper-level Spanish courses that examine detective fiction. These assignments would be developed from previous Digital Humanities work that I and several undergraduate and staff collaborators have conducted, primarily focused on digital mapping. Since the start of these collaborations, I have used these digital maps as both teaching tools to help students gain a better understanding of the geographic and spatial implications of each novel, as well as digital assignments where students have charted their own interpretations of each novel’s fictional geography.
Edith Renfrow’s Girlhood in Grinnell, 1915-1937
Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies) & Libby Eggert ’25
Over the course of Fall 2023, Libby Eggert ’25 created an ArcGIS StoryMap focused on the girlhood years of Edith Renfrow Smith, 1915-1937. Drawing on a selection of family photos, oral history interview excerpts, and school yearbook images, this website provides an affective experience into the upbringing of the girl Edith Renfrow and the experiences that prepared her to “recruit [her]self” to Grinnell College in 1933 and become the College’s first Black alumna in 1937.
GrinTECH: Technology Events for Social Good
Livia Stein Freitas ’25 & other presenters
GrinTECH is a student organization that organizes community events focused on tech for social good. Our three guiding values are: community engagement, professional development, and technology education. To uphold our mission, we have hosted interdisciplinary discussion panels, alumni talks, 3d printing workshops, and more.
Haitian Art Digital Crossroads
Fredo Rivera (Art History), Vivian Finch ’26, Maddie Yu ’25, Princess Alexander ’26, & Amen Wakjira ’26
HADC is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant-funded project building digital resources for Haitian art. Our project began as a collaboration between Grinnell College Libraries and the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA). Working with the Waterloo Center for the Art’s Haitian art collection and other collaborating partners, HADC assists in the digitizing and cataloging of art collections. Our approach to digitization rethinks standards within art history and museum studies, with close attention to the peculiarities of Haitian art traditions and practices. We seek to create an accessible database working across collections and informed by Haiti, its diaspora, and the Kreyol language.
Mapping Iowa Black Churches
Sarah Purcell (History), Ellen Hengesbach ’24, & Kari Bassett ’98
In conjunction with the Iowa Black History Research Collective, founded by Kari Basset ’98, faculty member Sarah Purcell ’92 and Vivero fellow Ellen Hengesbach ’24 have been working on an interactive mapping project to visualize geographic data about Black churches in Iowa. The project team has explored mapping platforms and is beginning work on a driving tour of central Iowa Black churches.
Publishing with Pressbooks
Catherine Chou (History) & HIS 283/233 students
For my 200-level courses, I have been experimenting with the publishing platform Pressbooks. The advantage of Pressbooks is that it allows students to share their work with one another (while still keeping the site private to the class as a whole). It’s been exciting and motivating for the students to know that their papers will have an audience beyond just me. Pressbooks utilizes WordPress on the backend to allow students to create eye-catching and attractive “chapters” with interactive features.
Rootstalk: A Prairie Journal of Culture, Science, and the Arts
Jon Andelson (Anthropology), Mark Baechtel (Humanities), Mark McFate (Libraries), & Mikey O’Connor ’24
We first conceived ROOTSTALK: A PRAIRIE JOURNAL OF CULTURE, SCIENCE, AND THE ARTS, in paper and board format. We soon became convinced of the benefits of a digital format for using multimedia content in addition to conventional print content of various kinds. Our evolution has paralleled and been driven by the evolution of Digital Grinnell. The publication that we are now producing is vastly different from the one we first conceived, and we have benefitted from the expertise of many colleagues and students.
Salisbury House Library Collection Digital Projects (including Illuminated Works at Grinnell)
Laura Michelson (Libraries) & Lu Johnston ’24
Learn more about Digital Projects brewing with the Salisbury House Library Collection and Special Collections from digital interpretation in the Magic Box display case, the collection WordPress, to digital sites featuring medieval manuscripts and early print that call Grinnell home. Interested in learning more about the collection or how to contribute to a digital project in Special Collections? Stop by and chat!
Virtual Surfaces: Using Virtual Reality to Help Students Understand Geometric Structures in Calculus
Christopher French (Mathematics), Shabab Kabir ’26, & Julian Kim ’26
Students taking multivariable calculus often struggle to understand the surfaces that arise in the study of functions of several variables. With the help of some more advanced students, I developed a VR tutorial that gives students the chance to interact more immediately with these three-dimensional objects: to see how surfaces can be understood in terms of their cross-sections, to understand how a function of three variables gives rise to level surfaces, and to get a feel for how certain equations correspond to certain types of surfaces.
Women’s Studies Worldwide
Clara Montague (Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies) & Cadence Chen ’26
Women’s Studies Worldwide is a digital mapping project created using ArcGIS Online that traces the global history of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies as an academic feminist initiative within higher education. Documenting around 1,000 degree programs, research centers, and consortia situated across more than 80 countries, WSW explores the factors that have helped create space for interdisciplinary identity knowledge fields over the last half-century. Informed by transnational feminism, this project seeks to disrupt misconceptions about the location and circulation of movements for gender and sexuality justice. WSW also aspires to build local, regional, national, and cross-border solidarities among GWSS practitioners and develop the field’s capacity to resist anti-feminist backlash, including efforts to ban gender studies and related diversity and inclusion initiatives both in the United States and in other countries.
Tutorial Plus: Short Instructional Videos for Flipped Learning
Belinda Backous (Academic Advising) & Kate Ferraro (Academic Advising)
Tutorial Plus is a 5-video series created for tutorial students, with the purpose of providing foundational learning around learning development that would be accessible by every first-year student. We used WeVideo as a tool for content creation–a very user friendly tool that anyone can learn quickly. Videos are posted directly onto Blackboard, and tutorial advisers are provided with reflection questions so they can foster discussion and connection in class after students have viewed the videos. We also offer the option of visiting tutorials to facilitate discussion and connection.