This semester we’re facilitating the Girls Who Code (GWC) club at Winter Park Library. We’re meeting Wednesday evenings between September 3rd to December 17th. Here is the public notice if interested. Note that the club targets tweens aged ~10-13. After an intro meeting, our club members will be working in Scratch and Javascript (first one,…
This summer (June 12-15) we ran a C# .NET evening bootcamp at Winter Park Library. We covered the basics of programming with a typed language and how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to make simple GUI applications. The crowd was mostly adults with one high schooler and one middle schooler. It was a nice, comfortable…
We’ve got a new video about the Rust programming language, specifically for those with existing programming experience. Fundamentals, borrow semantics and general advantages of the Rust language are discussed.
We taught a 3-part series on computing at Winter Park Library in April (14th, 21st, 28th 4-5:30pm). These talks were open to the public and took part in the computer lab. The crowd ranged from people with no computer experience at all to a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science! So we had our work cut…
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…
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…
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,…
