UWF moves Student Scholar Symposium online, invites community to learn about innovative research projects

The University of West Florida will celebrate student and faculty research in an innovative way at the Student Scholars Symposium and Faculty Research Showcase on Thursday, April 16. Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the symposium will be held completely online for the first time this year. UWF’s Office of Undergraduate Research will host the virtual symposium on its social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram. The symposium is usually held on campus and attracts hundreds of students and faculty.

The symposium will provide a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to post and share their work with the campus community, including projects interrupted by COVID-19. Students and faculty are invited to post their research on social media, tag @UWF_OUR and use the hashtags #UWF_SympoGoesVirtual and #uwfscholars20 to share online. The invitation is extended to the entire UWF community, not just those who previously submitted an abstract to present. 

“We have intentionally left the virtual event unstructured, providing the ‘space’ for students to fill with their creativity,” said Dr. Allison Schwartz, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. “We didn’t want to limit student creativity and so we have left things very open for students to rise to the occasion and surprise us with what they come up with.”

Those who log in to the symposium can expect to see a wide range of research projects presented in a variety of ways, including recorded audio presentations, a short documentary of a research topic, photos of students conducting research with a summary of the impact and a video of a short musical performance. There will also be live presentation sessions and links to those sessions will be shared with the campus community. Anyone can participate by joining in the discussion, asking questions, providing feedback and celebrating students’ work. 

One project, a robot chess game, will showcase human-robot interaction. Two robot arms were designed and built to play chess against each other. The robots can perform all of the possible chess moves including initial board setup. The robot arms mimic the chess game played between two wireless Android® tablets. The chess game app was specifically developed for this project and sends the chess move information to the arms using Wi-Fi®. The app consists of a complete chess game with an artificial intelligence algorithm built into the code, allowing for human vs. human gameplay or human vs. AI game play. The results of this project demonstrate human-robot interaction while opening the door for countless possibilities. Seniors Brad Stephen, an electrical engineering major, and Wade Earnest, a mechanical engineering major, worked on the project together.

“We appreciate OUR’s efforts to keep the symposium alive in some form or fashion,” Earnest said. “It was disappointing to think we were not going to be able to share it with everyone. We understand the future is still uncertain, but this helps a lot and gives us a little something to keep looking forward to while working on our projects.”

For more information, visit uwf.edu/our.