Upcoming Events

The next few weeks will be VERY busy for us.

Next weekend (the 15th to the 16th), three faculty and three students are going to Conference of Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges - East.  The students will be participating in a programming competition and faculty will be attending sessions focused on issues in teaching computer science.  It's a great place to get ideas from places that are similar to Ship.

The following weekend is Homecoming!  We will have our semi-annual meeting with our Industrial Advisory Council.  They come visit us twice a year to give us feedback on what we are doing and where we are heading.  In addition, six students will be participating in the IEEExtreme competition: a 24-hour programming competition.  Thanks to our alumni because your donations are funding this event in its entirety!

October 27th to October 30th, Dr. Armstrong and I will be attending Frontiers in Education 2010.  This is the premier national engineering education conference and we will be presenting our results from a preliminary study in which we used videos to explore how students learn to program.  We are hoping we will find a partner school or two so that we can generalize our findings.

Finally, November 7th will be the annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Competition of the International Collegiate Programming Competition.  We are one of six sites and we will host about 20 teams.  Judging is run in Virginia and this is one of the largest competitions in the nation.

Clearly, I'll have plenty to blog about for the next month!  I'll keep you posted!

Google Docs Changes our Classes

We have given all of our students Google Apps for Education Accounts.  Not only does this give them email accounts, but it also gives them Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and a bunch of other cool Google tools.  My Traditional Life Cycle class is a good example of how our students are using these tools.  They are working on a requirements document for a team project. Here is the team working away:

It might look like they are working individually, but, they are all editing the same document at the same time:

There is a constant hum as they debate the things I would expect them to be discussing, so they are clearly working as a team.  Different subgroups are working on different parts of the document, but they don't have to worry about combining those changes later.  They enjoy working this way and are building a good document.  My only real concern is that they are listening to Dirty Dancing!

Open House

A couple of Saturdays ago, I helped at our Open House for prospective students.  I should do that very regularly!  Bragging about our programs to them is a great way to remind me of all of the cool things we do.  There are so many things, I thought I'd share the slides from the presentation so everyone can be awed by us!  Let me know what I have missed so I can brag about more next time!

Tech Talks

Every Friday, Dr. Briggs is running a series of talks (Tech Talks) about our machines, labs, servers, etc.  Today he talked about accounts on our machines and how they can leverage AFS and our VPN to access/share files.  We are working on posting a video of the talk and notes with the details onto our equipment support web site: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.ship.edu/equipment-support/

Let us know if there are topics that you are interested in so we can keep this series going strong!

Dr. Lee's Research With Her Students

Dr. Lee has been actively working to involve both graduate and undergraduate students in her research projects.  She has just returned from a trip to The 13th CUR National Conference was Undergraduate Research which was titled Transformative Practice: Developing Leaders and Solutions for a Better Society. The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) National Conference 2010 was held at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, June 19 - 22, 2010. 

Dr. Lee presented a poster titled "Accurate and Efficient Solvers for Analyzing DNA Microarray Gene Expression" and it detailed her work on recovering missing values for a given DNA microarray gene expression for complex diseases like Crohn's Disease and Type II diabetes.  This is an ongoing project for Dr. Lee and she has successfully included Fen Qin, a graduate student, into the research.  This summer, she has grants to fund not only Fen's activities, but to also include Matt Freed, an undergraduate student.  Expect to see more as this project continues . . .

One of our Graduate Students Solved a Problem in SIAM

SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) poses problems to see if readers can solve them.  Recently, they posed "A Liouville-Type Property for Differential Inequalities" and one of our graduate students was an author on one of the solutions they accepted.  Check out Fen Qin's amazing mathematical skills.

Programming Team is victorious, again!

Our programming team competed at a contest at Dickinson College this weekend.  There were fifteen teams from about seven schools including Dickinson, Gettysburg, Messiah, and Lebanon Valley College.  Phil Diffenderfer, Andrew Marx, and Keith Porter came in first place by solving all of the problems with an hour to spare.  To challenge them, the head judge gave them an extra problem that was in previous competitions but never solved.  They came close to getting that one, too!  Dane Howard, Logan Kennedy, and Rob Koch solved five problems placing in third.  Philip Hagar and David Kelly solved two problems as did Jessica Burns, Emily Bruckart, and Danielle Leonard.  Four people earned jackets (Dane Howard, Andrew Marx (though both of them should have earned theirs previously), David Kelly, and Danielle Leonard!

We travel to West Chester to compete against the other State System teams on April 10th.  I think we'll do well!