After a couple of years of inactivity, our Programming Team is recreating itself! On March 30th, they competed in a competition at Dickinson College. Two teams competed: Huo’s Devils came in fourth solving three problems: Anthony DePaul, Steven Hetrick, and Joel Gingrich Huo’s Angels came in 18th solving two problems: Michael Permyashkin, John Gable, and Kim O’Neill  This is a great start for a team that is essentially brand new! I look forward to seeing their progress as they continue to compete. The results are posted at: http://users.dickinson.edu/~braught/ProgrammingContest/sp19contest.html The problem set can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v24ldm0x0g8ibww/Problems.zip?dl=0

This semester’s swag is motivated by Rubber Duck Debugging: rubber ducks tagged for our software engineering program. They have been a great way to talk about how describing a problem out loud helps you understand it in ways that thinking alone never does. To learn more about Rubber Duck Debugging, check out https://rubberduckdebugging.com/ – a great example of a description of a valuable technique told with appropriate, nerdy humor! Our students have taken to their ducks pretty quickly! They have named them and some carry them around. We have also put some in the classrooms for general use as shared pets!

The students in the Engineering Deck (our living learning community) took some time off to shoot at each other!  Laser tag was a big hit.  Perhaps we need to expand this next semester.

Check out the video of our Game Development Club’s submission to MagFest!  Thanks to Zach Thompson, Abe Loscher, and Chris Boyer!!!  Hope it gets accepted!

Both our Software Engineering and Computer Engineering programs have received ABET accreditation!!!  Check out why this matters.

Today we had the first WiCS-E meeting of the year and it was VERY productive! We started by eating chinese food (of which I forgot to take a picture). Then we opened the year with the annual shooting off of Diet Coke and Mentos. Here is everyone ready to go: The first one went off without a hitch: See the bottle we used: The second one blew so quickly that the string didn’t drop into the bottle (you can see it in the stream!): And, of course, Olivia wanted a drink! Then we decided to print something with the 3D printer.  An hour and a half later, we had Frederick the First: Meetings are Wednesdays at 4 and Thursdays at 6:30.  Come join us!    

Last spring, our students all gathered to talk about what they want our department to become.  A number of students had come back from CS Games with new ideas about how students could drive the activities in an engineering department.  They were looking for new ways to be involved, new ways to connect with each other, and new projects to work on.  Together, they brainstormed a lot of possibilities – more than the faculty could imagine and more than we could start right away.  To start things rolling, we have formed a temporary student government tasked with two missions: T-Shirts Everyone agreed that we need more department swag!  And our alumni were excited by the idea that swag was a way for them to re-connect with our current students.  Our Industrial Advisory Committee tasked us with having T-Shirts designed so that they could present them to the students – a … Continued

Our Game Dev team showed of their games at Too Many Games this weekend.  They had a bunch of fun things to show:   Rect Raider –  an android game in which you tilt your phone/tablet to try to catch good things and avoid bad things StoryMode – a rogue like game A couple of other prototypes    

We are currently accepting proposals for new department T-Shirts!  Our goal is to give every freshman and sophomore a department T-shirt and every junior and senior a shirt for their major, so we need a set of FOUR t-shirt designs.  Everyone will have the opportunity to vote and the designer of the winning set will win his/her choice of a 7″ tablet or $100 Amazon card! You can find the rules and make submissions at http://tp12life.com/contest/. If you have any questions, let me know! (merlin@cs.ship.edu)

  Our WiCS-E team spent the weekend in Washington, D.C. at the National Science and Engineering Festival. They showed of the Wonderfall that they built to great crowds who were very enthusiastic about how cool it is. People loved seeing their names be “printed” in the water! Over the two day exhibit, there might have been two 15 second intervals when we didn’t have a crowd! That didn’t stop us from having some fun. Here we are out to dinner together: You can see an early video of the wonder fall on youtube.

This weekend, our programming team traveled to Montreal to compete in CS Games.  They competed in a wide variety of competitions – most of which were completely new to us!  We won best Recruit of the Year: And the students came home ready to start preparing for next year’s competition!

Steve Bussey, a student in our Software Engineering program, traveled to the University of Michigan to compete in “The Most Epic Hackaton” last weekend.  A Hackathon is a 36-hour event where teams build full-scale applications and the coolest ones win.  You can learn more about hackatons at http://www.mhacks.org/. This hackathon was particularly epic because over 1000 people competed in University of Michigan’s arena: Imagine the networking that required! Steve’s team included students from Penn State University, but Steve wrote the code! Their application was designed to help you take care of and maximize the long-term value of your car: Check out the competition – Steve’s team won “Best use of Motor and Blackbook API,” making it a very successful weekend!  Congrats to Steve!!!