FICS Student Papers

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https://repository.upou.edu.ph/handle/20.500.13073/11
Research outputs by graduate students and selected Capstone Project Reports by undergraduate students of the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies.

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    Creating a Digital Storybook: Edjop: A Child of the Storm by Ed Maranan
    ( 2024-08-29) Lapuz, Rianne G.
    Digital storybooks have started emerging in today’s classrooms as a result of modern technology. Numerous studies were conducted to assess their impact as a tool for learning. With references to such studies, this practice-based research project was conceptualized to develop a digital book that can be instrumental in popularizing historical stories suitable for young students. The digital storybook features Edgar “Edjop” Jopson and the plight he experienced during Martial Law. This digital version was based on Edgar Maranan’s picture storybook, Edjop: A Child of the Storm. The design process for developing the digital storybook included the following: cross-referencing of online articles and a movie about Edjop; creating illustrations, audio recording for both the original English and Filipino versions, website creation, and collaboration with the educators of the target audience. Research results revealed that the majority of the teachers who evaluated the digital storybook agreed that the whole digital book is a suitable medium for 6th-grade learners. There was a balance of different elements: layout, illustration, color, and audio, which are appropriate for the story. They strongly agreed that digital storybooks can facilitate not only the learning of Martial Law but also other topics for sixth graders. Likewise, the digital storybook was reviewed through the “Think Aloud” protocol. The findings showed that changes in illustration color (notably of the book cover) and the removal of Soundcloud links per paragraph can vastly improve the product homepage. There was a recommendation to create an offline version of the digital storybook to address accessibility issues.
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    Development of Out-of-school Youth Monitoring and Evaluation System (OSYMES) for USAID Opportunity 2.0 Program
    ( 2024) La-Anan, John Patrick S.
    The USAID-funded Opportunity 2.0 (O2) program supports the Philippine education system in providing second-chance opportunities for 180,000 out-of-school youth (OSY) to pursue employment, entrepreneurship, or further education. A crucial element of the program is the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system, which ensures effective program implementation and resource utilization. However, the current M&E system, M&E Insight, developed by the Education Development Center (EDC) in the US, has faced challenges in meeting the evolving data and reporting needs of the program. The local M&E team, with limited expertise in the system’s underlying programming language (C#), and the complex process of change management with the US office, struggled to address these issues promptly. As a result, the team resorted to manual data entry and consolidation through Youth Trackers, which presented challenges in data validation, deduplication, and report generation. To address these challenges, the Out-of-School Youth Management and Evaluation System (OSYMES) was created to improve data collection, reduce reliance on manual processes, and ensure more accurate and timely reporting. Built with PHP, OSYMES offers a more flexible and user-friendly interface, enabling the local M&E team to quickly adapt to evolving program requirements. The system also incorporates automated deduplication and multithreading to enhance processing efficiency, while leveraging cloud-based services through AWS Lambda and S3 to optimize resource management. Additionally, the inclusion of a reporting dashboard provides stakeholders with real-time reports to support decision-making. By addressing the limitations of M&E Insight, OSYMES represents a significant step forward in enhancing data management and improving the overall effectiveness of the O2 program's efforts to support out-of-school youth in the Philippines. The development of OSYMES utilized a V-shaped model process. Its prototype was set-up in an AWS environment, which acted as the testing environment for the M&E Team from different O2 project sites to participate in the testing. Testing results showed that OSYMES met the expected requirements, allowing the team to do away with manual data consolidation. To understand how well OSYMES was received, a survey was conducted to see how useful and easy it was to use. Everyone agreed that OSYMES would significantly boost their productivity and make tasks easier to complete, especially with the deduplication feature, which streamlined a lot of their work. While most users found the system easy to learn and navigate, they suggested that some additional training and a phased rollout would help make the transition smoother. Overall, the team felt that OSYMES was a big improvement over the previous M&E Insight system.
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    Gutom: Analyzing Reader's Experiences Towards Emotional Healing and Resiliency in Webtoon Series
    ( 2024-09-11) Enero, Norianne O.
    Creative narratives are powerful psychological tools that shape an individual’s thinking, influencing their knowledge and emotions (Gupta & Jha, 2022).Webtoons increases emotional engagement of the readers, and can be used as a literary tool to educate students in a classroom setting (Dar et al., 2023). So, what if there was a webtoon that contains positive themes of self-discovery, emotional healing and resiliency, and mature themes such as abuse or domestic violence. How will the readers react or perceive the characters, and the themes in the story? This study employs a qualitative research design, utilizing thematic analysis as the primary method to identify and interpret recurring patterns within the data. The data would be the opinions, and thoughts of the participants towards the themes, and characters in the webtoon series, Gutom: The Tale of the Wandering Manananggal.
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    Enhancing the UPOU Virtual Campus Tour with Immersive Videos
    ( 2024-08-24) Pesimo, Christine Faye L.
    As part of fulfilling UPOU's vision and mission to promote an effective learning environment for its students and faculty, the institution recently launched its first virtual campus tour. This creative project correlates with the university’s mission to incorporate immersive technologies; this is an effective presentation of the main features of the campus, programs, and services offered by the university. This creative project aims to improve the UPOU Virtual Campus Tour with the help of immersive videos. The purpose is to improve the usability and effectiveness of the users and thus contribute to a better and more positive user experience. By integrating such attributes, this project aims to improve the experience when it comes to the exploration of the UPOU campus in cyberspace.
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    Exploration of 3D Reconstruction Techniques for the UPOU FMDS’ Perma G.A.R.D.E.N.: Contributing to Its Digital Twin Development
    ( 2024)
    This project aims to explore emerging 3D reconstruction techniques applied to the UPOU FMDS’ Perma G.A.R.D.E.N., in contribution to its digital twin development. The objectives include providing a simplified overview of how the explored 3D reconstruction methods work, testing these techniques to the garden, and assessing their output models in terms of visual accuracy and usability. The project also addresses and acknowledges various issues, explores an optimal methodology, and includes prototyping and recommendations to provide insights for future developers and researchers working on the garden’s digital twin. Among the three explored techniques—Photogrammetry, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and Gaussian Splatting—Gaussian Splatting was found to be the most suitable for the garden, based on visual accuracy and usability. The optimal methodology utilized the Nerfstudio framework with its “splatfacto” method, which is its Gaussian Splatting procedure. For prototyping, PlayCanvas was used with its support for editing and integrating Gaussian Splatting 3D models. Various issues were addressed and acknowledged during these phases. The insights from this project could benefit future developers and researchers involved in the garden’s digital twin project by demonstrating the differences between the 3D reconstruction methods and their application to the garden. The prototypes provided, which are available as open educational resources, could inspire the enhancement of the current digital twin of the garden, which is its 360-degree photo based Virtual Reality (VR) tour, by integrating walkability through a 3D model, thus increasing its immersive experience.