Excellence in 

Design

CONGRATULATIONS

to Xavier Cohen, Sandro Mortimer and Natasha Murthy who have been acknowledged for excellence in their VET studies in 2021.

The team have been selected for inclusion in the prestigious Top Designs 2022exhibition, showcasing the project they developed as part of their VET - Integrated Studies.

Read the details of Natasha's project below.

Natasha Murthy

Year 12

My project, Realtime Measurement & Feedforward of Student Engagement in Classrooms,  was undertaken as part of my VET course - Integrated Technologies last year.

The project is designed to use nonobtrusive methods to track student engagement in classroom settings. The system uses CNNs (convolutional neural networks) to identify and track the duration of student engagement by their facial expressions. Se the system overview graphic and click on it to enlarge.

Simultaneously, I also track the student’s hand movement to monitor if they are writing, stationary or using their hand for other activity. Along with this, I also track classroom verbal interaction of the teacher, student, and general classroom voice data. To further understand student engagement, I also track teacher movement across the classroom. Teacher interaction data points are used to identify the possible effect of a teacher’s classroom physical movement and verbal interaction has on student engagement. 

These 5 data streams are recorded in a time series database and presented via a real-time dashboard for observability by the teacher / principal / school administrators.  

The teacher is also provided with haptic feedback when the student is showing a higher-than-average disengagement which then allows them to customise their pedagogy to re-engage with the student. 

My project harnesses the power of Machine Learning CNNs, low-cost microcontrollers and student’s laptop to help address one of the most important aspects of academic performance - student engagement in the classroom.  At no point are video or audio data stored and thus student / teacher privacy is preserved.

The  system detects the engagement level of students using four main components: a built-in webcam in a laptop/computer, audio samples of the classroom and a tracking system of the teacher for the duration of the class (which is all automated) and an accelerometer with CNN running on this edge device.  

The built-in web cam is designed to work in real time to process the location and movement of the eyes, head, and vital parts of the face through a neural network.  This data is used to calculate a 'concentration index' of two classes of engagement: Engaged and Disengaged.  Over 600 images were used to train the neural network capturing 468 landmarks on each face.

Top Designs 2022

Top Designs 2022 opens on Saturday 2 April 2022 at Melbourne Museum. The exhibition closes on Sunday 10 July 2022.

Visit the exhibition in person, and entry to Top Designs is free with museum entry - and remember, students can enter Melbourne Museum for free!

What is Top Designs?

Top Designs is an annual exhibition hosted by Melbourne Museum presenting work created by students who completed VCE Media, Product Design and Technology, Systems Engineering, Theatre Studies and Visual Communication Design, as well as a range of VCE VET studies including Creative and Digital Media, Engineering, Furnishing, Integrated Technologies and Music Industry (Sound Production).

To be eligible, works must achieve an A+ or A on the School-assessed Task.