2023 Math/CS Day
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.
Mechanical Engineering Field Trip
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!
Emergency MFA Bypass – Live
The emergency MFA Bypass utility is now live for currently active students. To use this method, students must have access to their SHIP.EDU email as it is used to validate their identity. Once initiated, students will receive an email addressed to their SHIP.EDU email account containing a personalized link for initiating the bypass process. Students will have one hour to use this link and initiate the process before the code expires. Once the process has been initiated, students will only have 5 minutes to log into their sponsored GMail account. Once logged in, they will be prompted to configure their MFA setting if they have not already done so.
Please note, this method has a finite number of uses so it is highly recommended that students configure MFA the first time they use this method. Students who fail to configure MFA and exceed the maximum number of uses will have their accounts terminated as they are officially failing to comply with a defined School of Engineering policy.
The link to the Bypass Request Form is:
https://web.engr.ship.edu/for-students/password-reset-request/mfa-bypass-request/
There will be some minor modifications to the current FAQs which will include this link and a basic description of how and why it should be used.
At this time, this method can only be utilized by users who are actively enrolled at Shippensburg University. A modified system for alumni, which will require a faculty sponsor, is in testing and should be available in the next few weeks. The automated system for alumni has been cancelled at this time – see FAQ #13.
Emergency MFA Bypass
We understand that devices fail and as such, we are working to implement a secure method which would allow users to temporarily bypass the MFA requirement for the School of Engineering sponsored GSuite Accounts. For those users who failed to configure their accounts before the deadline of December 2nd, they will need to wait until this system is in place to regain access to their accounts.
If access is critical in order to complete an academic assignment, students should contact their professor and ask them to contact the School of Engineering’s Systems Manager on their behalf. Please include an explanation of why you failed to comply with the defined MFA deadline.
MFA Enforcement Update
The initial email on this subject included one piece of incorrect information. Unlike Azure and other cloud services, Google does not allow any account without an active MFA configuration to login once it is being enforced.
Due to this invalid information, the enforcement of MFA has been rescheduled to the end of December 2, 2022. YOU MUST HAVE YOUR MFA CONFIGURED BY THEN OR YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO YOUR CS/ENGR ACCOUNT – NO EXCEPTIONS!
MFA Enforced For Sponsored GSuite Accounts
Multi-factor Authentication, also known as MFA, will be required for all School of Engineering GMail accounts as of November 21, 2022. While MFA has been enabled for years, it was not enforced to accommodate the less technical students enrolled in School of Engineering courses. With MFA now being enforced for all SHIP.EDU student accounts starting the Fall of 2022, we have decided that MFA is no longer optional.
School of Engineering Website Rework
As many aspects of life return to normal here at Shippensburg University, major updates to the website are being processed. The website is being restructured to phase out the COVID-19 specific content without losing information which is still relevant. Items, such as the lab access request form and usage procedures, are being updated.
Programming Team is Making Headway!
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.
Huo’s Angels 
Programming Team Competitions aren’t just for programming!
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
Turn to the Duck Side
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!
Russel Stevens named his duck Charlotte and even 3D printed a name plate for her
Too Many Games and MAGFest 2017
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 improve stability and add in such things as sound and music.
To get the game accepted they created a short video to show off the game, see MagFest Entry, and after that made it through the first iteration, a demo that could be played for at least 15 minutes. Once accepted the group planned out the look of the booth and we were all set. In keeping with the theme of Spectrum Shooter being a game where you change the color of the shots the club went with mulit-colored Christmas lights to finish off the look of the booth.
A total of 10 people went down to MAGFest 2017, three of which were the core development team for Spectrum Shooter: Zach Thompson, Abe Loscher, and Chris Boyer.
From Left to Right (Front): Chris Boyer, Zach Thompson, Emmanuel Douge, and Ben Weist
From Left to Right (Back): Luke Frankenfield, Abe Loscher, Nathaniel Manning, Evan Schoenberger, and Liz Ostrow. Not Pictured: Dr. Girard
The club is already planning for Too Many Games 2017 and what game(s) they will try and submit for MAGFest 2018 (Light Fight is one already being planned).
Laser Tag!
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.
MagFest Entry
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!
ABET Accreditation!
Both our Software Engineering and Computer Engineering programs have received ABET accreditation!!! Check out why this matters.
News from the Engineering Lab
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/
New Swag Available!
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!
Freescale Cup is Off to a Start!
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.
Too Many Games 2015
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 much more. He built the game using the LibGDX game development engine.
In addition to Nick’s game Ledny Joseph showed off Larry Awesome!!!!, a platformer type game where you play a homeless guy called Larry that must explore a strange world in search of money. In the game Larry can find various power ups to help him make it through the world. Ledny’s game is built in Java without any support of a game engine. As such he had to build all the tools to manage assets, sound, user input, and physics.
Dane Howard brought an interesting game where you use your mind to try and move a ball into your opponent’s goal. It used new headgear that is able to read signals from the brain and a Raspberry Pi board to run the game.
Lastly, the main artist for the club, Gabriela (Gabby) Rocha, showed off her artwork. Some of which has been used in games developed by the club.
While there the developers (Nick and Ledny) were interviewed twice. We hope to post links to the interviews should they become available.
PACISE 2015
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 Hydock, and Daniel Tigyer all present papers at the conference. Dr. Briggs presented the paper “Property Constraint Generation”, which also won best paper faculty paper award. Nicholas Hydock presented a paper based on work from the Video Game Development Club, called “Creating a Purposely Tedious Game: How to Design and Balance a Game that Abuses Procedural Generation”. Lastly, Daniel Tigyer presented the paper, “A New Chaos-Based Image-Encryption and Compression Algorithm: A Review” for which he won best the student paper award.
Douglas Rudolph, Raistlin Hess, and Kevin Dederer represented Shippensburg University’s Programming Team in the programming team competition. They successfully solved two problems and placed in the top half of the teams competing. Overall, it was a really cool conference enjoyed by all.
CSGames 2015 in Canada
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!
40th Anniversary of the Computer Science major!
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
Electrical Engineering program approved!
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/
First WiCS-E Meeting!
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!
Student Rebellion
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 way of saying, “I am a successful Ship grad – now you are on your way to being that, too.” The temporary student government is running a T-shirt design competition with the goal of giving every freshman and sophomore a department T-shirt and every junior and senior a program T-shirt (CS, SE, or CMPE).
Student Government
It was agreed that we should form a representative student government whose responsibilities would include:
- inter-club coordination and creation of new clubs
- helping faculty with curriculum and policy changes
- pursing new opportunities like arranging for a department dorm area in the new dorms
- fund raising
- and generally keeping the students and the faculty connected.
The temporary government is drafting by-laws for the structure and election of this new government.
The Big Event
The temporary government will cease to exist on October 23rd. On that evening, we will hold an official event where alumni will hand out the T-shirts and the officers of the new student government will be announced. EVERYONE SHOULD COME!!!!!!
Game Dev Demo at Too Many Games
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
T-Shirt Contest
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)
WiCS-E at National Science & Engineering Festival
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.
CS Games
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!
MHacks Winner!
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!!!
PACISE 2012 – Victory!
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!
