The summer fellowship program, funded by the Office for Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavor (URaCE) has come to a close and the first part of our Smart Cities: Building a Smart Chattanooga project is complete! The three undergraduate students who worked on our project did an amazing job researching and building story maps for our three pilot sites: Old Stone Church Steeple, Stringer’s Ridge, and Cameron Hill. They presented a poster on the project at the URaCE research symposium at the end of the summer.
The project has received quite a bit of positive attention and our next steps are to polish the story maps and have an official launch to make them public. All three of the summer fellow students will be assisting with a journal article related to their research findings. Furthermore, two of the three students have opted to officially continue working on finalizing and expanding the project for individual studies credit this fall semester.
The exciting thing about this project is that it has endless expansion potential – so we are looking forward to continuing to work on it with our current students, while also recruiting and training new students who are interested in researching and story mapping other sites in Chattanooga!
Shannon McCarragher, Ph.D. 