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notes-2-23

February 23rd, 2005
Secretary: Dave Uryasz

Prof. Pitt is in St. Louis this week, but guests Umesh Thakkah,
Barbara Hug, Kathless Harness, and Kathleen Smith were here to talk to us.

Umesh Thakkar

PowerPoint presentation
Virtual Reality allows exploration of
  • structures that are difficult to conceptualize and visualize
  • places inaccessible because of location or danger
  • places of different times/far places
  • example: simulation of crossing streets
3 levels of fluency necessary:
  • Intellectual Capabilities (anticipate changing tech)
  • IT concepts (algorithms)
  • IT skills (using a computer)

VR Savvy:

Motivation: 'incredible shrinking pipeline' less and less women in CS through HS and college
  • need to engage kids in IT, such as through all-girl computing events and VR programs
  • CS being in engineering (not LAS) makes it less accessible?
  • US Bureau of Labor says massive IT growth, need high-skill people
  • current things dont allow learned to create anything or are aimed towards university students
Project Goals:
1) Allow middle school girls to learn CS material
2) Understand if girls enjoy designing and creating their worlds, develop program girls used to do it
3) Determine usefulness of VisBox, a mobile version of CAVE, the VR simulator at UIUC.

Results:
  • Girls (7,8 grade) came in on tuesdays to work and presented to teachers, parents, experts
  • Students worked better in own environment, rather than CAVE

VIDEOCLIP: we saw a video of 2 girls working on a farm scene.
They used the VR Savvy tools to add a walkway in the scene.
They used terms they may not have known before ('texture', 'clone', 'interface').

Future Plans:
  • funding possibilities for VisBox at schools

Barbara Hug (and Kathleen Harness and Kathleen Smith)

Barbara is a faculty member in Education C&I (math, science, tech). Here doctorate is in developmental biology, but she switched when saw girls were interested in science, but not going through with it.

Project1: Handhelds @ U of Michigan

Most classrooms have 1-2 desktops, can't afford 30 of them. Handhelds, on the other hand, are more affordable.

'How Can Good Friends Make You Sick?'
Generation 1: 'Thinking Tags'
  • small wearable, programmable computers allowing Participatory Simulations
  • showed model of disease propogation
Generation 2: Palm Pilots w/ 'Cooties'
  • handhelds beam code back and forth, infect each other
  • students investigate how disease was spread
  • much easier to program than Gen 1

Project2: Squeak @ UIUC

We went through SqueakCMI and looked at student's projects
Kathleen Harness talked about how excited her students get about simple Squeak functions invited us to meet with her students Th and F mornings.

Class

The class then worked on projects.