We’ve been volunteer reading science books at The Parke House Academy for the last 5 years. We’ve only had time for 1 or 2 readings a school year, but kids can never have too much exposure to science. The questions and comments make it all worth it 🙂
UCF SMST PhD student John Sermarini gave an Intro to Unity presentation to the Mobile Computing (CINF304) students at Stetson University today. He explained how to set up a simple scene, switch scenes, and configure simple objects with fundamental components. He also presented various projects developed in Unity, including a few of his own, such…
Another year, another Hour of Code for the Parke House Academy! We presented to ~40 students and 6 teachers this year, and guided them through the new Dance Party activity. Happy CSEdWeek!
Congratulations are in order for Bishop Moore High School students, Marcus Lisman, Patrick Snider, and Liam Sy, who won first place at the Future Leaders Pavilion at I/ITSEC this year! Congratulations also to Sharon Dearman, their computer science teacher, and UCF SMST Ph.D. student, John Sermarini, for mentoring the students. The students developed and demoed…
Posted by Joe Del Rocco Here are some pictures created with the Python turtle library by my CS0 (pre-CS1) students at Stetson University. These students are learning programming and computer science for the first time, and 30% of them are in non-computing majors.
We released Amphibian, a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA that converts Java code to blocks and vice versa. The initial codebase was branched from the Droplet Editor (used by Pencil Code, Code.org, etc.) that we modified to support various additional languages. Blanchard, J., Gardner-McCune, C., & Anthony, L. (2019, October). Amphibian: Dual-Modality Representation in Integrated Development…
Presenting at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) 2019 Text languages are perceived by many computer science students as difficult, intimidating, and/or tedious in nature. Conversely, blocks-based environments are perceived as approachable, but many students see them as inauthentic. Bidirectional hybrid environments provide textual and blocks-based representations of the same code,…
We’re working on integrating WebAssembly via SpiderMonkey VM into Minetest, an open-source, Minecraft-inspired, voxel game engine written in C++ with game functionality and plugins written in Lua. Our long term goal is to allow a multitude of languages to be used to write plugins for Minetest to be used for computer science education. Our codebase…
We had the pleasure of working w/ UCF Camp Connect this summer. Every year UCF hosts various STEM related camps, workshops, and activities for K-12 students. From their website: “Camp Connect is a week-long day camp that introduces students to a variety of engineering disciplines such as Electrical, Computer, Industrial, Mechanical, Aerospace, Civil, Environmental, Construction,…
Last night we participated in Orlando Science School Elementary‘s “Family Technology Night.” This time we brought along an IR sensing teddy bear. The kids (and parents) really enjoyed seeing how cool/hot they were – and learning about different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. We presented the following exhibits: IR camera connected to Raspberry Pi 3…
