Math/CS Day – Math & Computer Science Day is a celebration of great ideas and problems in mathematics and programming. As part of the event there is a high school programming contest that Programming Team Club helps organize with Dr. Girard. This year 15 different high school programming teams attempted to solve problems created by the Programming Team Club. The winners were Hempfield Team Two with Third place, Cedar Crest Team One with Second place, and Lower Dauphin Team One with First place.

On April 05, 2023, Mechanical Engineering junior undergraduate students of Shippensburg University (class of 2024)  visited N.E. Reihart & Sons, Inc., a steel fabricator and machine shop located in Huntingdon, PA. The field trip was organized by Dr. Joao Dias, Assistant Professor of the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering as part of the schedule of the MECH 310 – Manufacturing Processes classes. During the visit, the students had the opportunity to see the operation of modern manufacturing processes based on automation for industrial-scale production. Special thanks to Jody Burdge, Secretary of the School of Engineering, who kindly volunteered to drive the students to the visit site!

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!

OpenHouse2017

Over the past year the Video Game Development Club has gotten the chance to present as an Indie developer at both Too Many Games 2016 and MAGFest 2017. At Too Many Games 2016, they showed off: Light Fight (Evan Schoenberger), Spectrum Shooter (Zach Thompson), Click Game (Nathaniel Manning), and a Platformer (Trevor Kelly).            (From Left to Right: Zach, Nathaniel, Evan, and Trevor) During the 3 day event Dr. Girard also threw together a simple game while preparing for a course. Students also got to meet with alumni and get interviewed while at Too Many Games. For MAGFest 2017 the club had to submit for approval any games to be shown for approval by the MIVS committee. Based on the feedback from Too Many Games the club decided to submit Spectrum Shooter. Zach Thompson, with the help of Chris Boyer and Abe Loscher set about rebuilding the game to … Continued

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.

RIGOL Technologies recently launched a new education initiative, featuring the o-scope manuals that were developed here at Shippensburg.  “Dr Tom Briggs from Shippensburg University has created two Labratory Guides using the RIGOL DS1000Z and our demonstration board to teach Oscilloscope skills.   We are thankful for his partnership and excited to be able to offer this curriculum to our DS1Z customers.” – Mike Rizzo, general manager for RIGOL USA.  They also featured a quote from Dr. Briggs in a press release on the Evaluation Engineering blog. http://www.evaluationengineering.com/2016/02/16/rigol-expands-mixed-signal-oscilloscope-portfolio/

We have just opened a Cafe Press site where you can find cool stuff with the logos for each CSE major: http://www.cafepress.com/shippensburgcsande. The profits will go to support the many cool things we have going on, so start your holiday shopping now!

  Joss Steward and Jared Good are shown working on the Freescale Cup car for their crew NullPointer.  The car is programmable with a simple camera to help it determine how to navigate a race track.  In October they and their other crew members will be competing against the other two crews, Out of Bounds and Off by One, to see which car can navigate a race track in the shortest time.  The first track will be a simple straight track, while later competition tracks will include curves, hills, and intersections.      

The Video Game Development Club (http://students.cs.ship.edu/gamedev/) went to Too Many Games 2015 on June 26th – 28th. It was the forth time the club had gone as an Indie developer. Attending as active members of the club were: Ledny Joesph, Zach Thompson, Gabby Rocha, Chris Hersh, and Martino Dang with their club advisor Dr. Girard. Alumni present were Nick Hydock (just graduated), David Jones (just graduated), Andy Hoffman, Dane Howard, William Fisher, Matt Hydock, and Red Herring. This year Nick Hydock showed off his much improved game, Story Mode, a rouge-like game where the dungeons are created by selecting specific files on your computer. What sort of dungeon you explore is determined from the type and size of the file. Over the past year he has improved the game by adding different terrain types for the dungeons, bosses to battle, new things to do with the items you gather, and … Continued

PACISE 2015 Dr. Girard, Dr. Briggs, Dr. Mooney and 9 Shippensburg University students attended the 2015 PACISE conference on April 10th and 11th. Dr. Girard along with Ledny Jones and Ian Keefer presented posters on their work from the Video Game Development club. Dr. Girard’s poster was titled “A Procedural Content Generation System for Roads and Cities”, Ledny Jones’ poster was titled “Larry Awesome Platformer Game”, and Ian Keefer’s poster was titled “Entity Component Systems in Game Development”. Additionally, Tyler Dalious present a poster on work related to a research grant he is working on with Dr. Briggs, Tyler Garrett, Chris Jeffrey, and Josh Lowe. His poster was titled “Water Quality Sensor”. The key note speaker was Jesse Schell who talked about “Careers in Game Development: Past, Present, and Future”. He was the lead designer of Toon Town and presently runs the game company Schell Games (www.schellgames.com). Dr. Briggs, Nicholas … Continued

While most students were enjoying a laid back Spring Break, a group of CSE students headed to snowy Canada for the CSGames competition. The event was held at Sherbrooke University in Sherbrooke, Quebec on March 14th & 15th. This was the third year that Shippensburg has been represented in the Games. For future reference, this event is open to any interested CSE undergrad student!

Computer Science memorabilia will be on display. Cake and refreshments will be available. Where: Fishbowl in Dauphin Humanities Center When: Thursday, October 23rd, 2014 Time: 5PM – 8PM  

The Board of Governors approved the first Electrical Engineering degree program to be offered in Pennsylvania’s State System. Beginning in Fall 2015, Shippensburg University will be offering a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. http://www.passhe.edu/inside/ne/press/Pages/default.aspx Check out the University’s press release. https://www.ship.edu/News/2014/10/Shippensburg_gets_OK_for_electrical_engineering_program/

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!!!

The Programming Team competed in this year’s PACISE (The Pennsylvania Association of Computer and Information Science Educators) competition.  PACISE is the annual conference for faculty who teach computer science or information systems in PASSHE schools and always includes a programming competition for students. Our first team, Ship Derezzed! (Jessica Burns, Steve Bussey, and Danielle Johnston) placed first solving 4 of the 6 problems (NOT the one I submitted!)  Team Sigh (Josh Beck, Josiah Knoll, and Noah Kline) solved 2 problems and Hexadecimators (Emily Bruckart, TJ Dalious, and Fred Young) solved 1problem. As part of the conference, they got to see a presentation by one of the engineers who helped develop Watson, so it was a successful trip on all fronts! Back row: Noah Kline, Joshua Beck, Danielle Johnston, Fred Young, Josiah Knoll, and TJ Dalious. Front row: Matt Miller, Steve Bussey, Jessica Burns, Emily Bruckart, and Matthew Hydock.