Students at William Penn University Applied Technology Display What They Have Learned
Students at William Penn University Applied Technology Display What They Have Learned During The Past Semester
Oskaloosa, Iowa – Students at William Penn University Applied Technology took some time to show off their creations from what they have learned over the last semester. The Computer Networking Lab located in the Musco Technology Center played host to the students, staff and public, where they also displayed the software engineering class’s wind turbine power generation tracking project.
The new lab was put in recently “with the help of Administration and MCG,” said Jon Stevens. The lab will be used for teaching networking, computer science lab, and as a multipurpose lab for the Computer Science Major program at WPU.
There were computers designed for gaming, others looking towards server roles, while some took the route of general computing.
On display were computers the students had built using their lab fees. Each student designed and then purchased the components, built the computer, and installed the software including the operating system “from scratch. You can’t go to Wal-Mart and buy one,” Stevens said of the projects. The computers mostly all featured quad-core processors with some having as many as six cores for more processing power.
One gaming pc also featured a ‘Cross Fire’ set-up that features two video cards or (GPU’s) to enable even more graphics processing power.
This computer was built by Zach White. “I’ve been around computers since a young age. I really started getting into it when I was around 15 years old,” White said that over the years he has built several computers, and that his newest one uses a pair of Radeon 5870 GPU’s. That technology allows a user faster and smoother rendering of 3D and 2D objects.
Beyond the dual GPUs, the computer also features a solid state drive for holding data and the operating system.
White stated the advantages of using a solid state drive over a traditional hard drive that uses platters is much faster read and writes, allowing for quicker performance.
