Dr. Adrea Truckenmiller, MSU Associate Professor of Special Education, and her research team have a vision to change the way writing is taught in elementary schools. To bring that vision to life, they needed expertise that could transform it from an idea to a working application.
Work on the application initially started in 2017 with an outside contractor. However, after the contracted project ended, Truckenmiller and her team needed support moving the hosting from the contractor to its own domain as well as some additional functionality based on lessons learned from field testing.
Truckenmiller reached out to MSU IT’s Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) team for support. RCI’s Brad Fears and Dong Duong stepped in to help complete Truckenmiller’s vision, The Writing Architect.
“This application is an innovative tool to help teachers prioritize writing instruction that will be most effective for individual students,” Truckenmiller said. “I thought I would have to seek a new contractor and start from scratch, but RCI was a much better solution.”
The Writing Architect is an instructional tool to match research-based writing instruction with students’ current level of development in critical areas of writing. A real conduit for student success, Truckenmiller said the Writing Architect will be an open-source tool for all schools in Michigan to use.
“We can maintain it for use with our pre-service teachers in the College of Education to make them more effective teachers when they become teachers across the state after their graduation,” Truckenmiller added.
Truckenmiller praised the RCI team for their assistance.
“Their work will make my project more competitive for future research grants. And most importantly, their work serves the land grant mission of MSU,” Truckenmiller said. “The Research Cyberinfrastructure team is truly an asset for making MSU a ‘best-in-class’ place to learn and work.”
Fears said, as consultants, RCI would typically find a resource within IT to do the work. However, Duong, who recently joined the team as a student employee, is a computer science major and could provide the assistance needed.
“We thought why not have Dong take a look,” Fears said. “Dong deserves a lot of the credit for having picked up someone else’s code and being able to work on it.”
“They were so responsive to our needs, anticipated security and design issues I never would have known about and accomplished very large tasks in a very short amount of time,” Truckenmiller said. “Their communication, professionalism, skillset, and knowledge of current best practices were huge assets to the web application and to me as a faculty.”
Truckenmiller will be presenting the Writing Architect application at the upcoming 2025 Innovation Celebration, which showcases innovative technologies and startups developed by MSU faculty and students, on April 1 at Kellogg Center.
