On Sunday, May 24, 2009 five new Computer Science majors joined the ranks of Centre Alumni. At the left, Professor Joe Oldham, Elizabeth Denny, Zack Upton, Drew McKinney, Carol Hummel and Professor Christine Shannon, assembled in front of Newlin Hall after the commencement exercises. Not pictured is Eric Hill who completed work for his degree in December and received his degree in absentia.
One Tuesday, May 5, 2009, the Centre Community assembled in Newlin Hall to celebrate a variety of student accomplishments. The winner of the Computer Science Prize was Carol Hummel who was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
Carol decided to major in computer science rather late in her career. But in spite of having to take courses without all the prerequisites and completing the course in Theory of Computing by appointment with Professor Oldham, Carol rose to the top of her class.
A number of student have been awarded summer interships and othrs have been accepted to REU's (Research Experiences for Undergraduates). Here is a list of the ones of which the program is aware.
This spring saw a welcome influx of new students who declared majors or minors in Computer Science.
| New Majors | |
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Scott Albertine |
Juan Landeverde |
| Qushawn Clark | Conor Mather-Licht |
| Ryan Curry | Mary Takhtjian |
| David Fritz | Qian Xie |
| Kurtis Hage | |
New Minors |
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| Nicola Klein | Eric Wesolowski |
As usual, the program said farewell to graduating seniors and welcomed new majors and minors at the annual spring picnic. This year it was held on the courtyard behind Old Centre and although the skies were cloudy, there was plenty of good food, conversation, and a little light sabre play!
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| New members to the program: Mary Takhtjian and Nicola Klein | The May pole goes up -- even though it wasn't May Day! |
Alex Waldrop and Alex Wegener |
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| On the far side of the table: Professor Oldham, Qian Xie, Kurtis Hage, Drew McKinney, Brittany Devine, Anna Bland. One the near side: Conor Mather-Licht, Elizabeth Denny, Carol Hummel, Jessica Szweda, and Zack Upton | Thanh Nguyen, Alex Waldrop and Alex Wegener line up for the usual chicken, cole slaw and chips, followed by a variety of cookies and brownies supplied by the faculty for the picnic. | Conor Mather-Licht and Elizabeth Denny were just two of the students who tried their hand at light sabres when the meal was complete. |
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| Chris Culbreth, Louesa Akin and Neil Liu all have an interest in Computer Science. | Zack Upton, Jessica Szweda, Carol Hummel, Conor Mather-Licht and Thanh Nguyen | Juan Landeverde, Neil Liu, Jessica Szweda Zack Upton and Ryan Curry. |
For as long as Centre College has offered courses in Computer Science, students have had the opportunity to learn from Professor Art Moore. He came to Centre as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics in September of 1982 and was very instrumental in the development and launching of the Computer Science minor which saw its first graduates in 1987. The first major graduated in 1993.
His career took quite a turn when Professor Moore moved over to McReynolds in June 1992 to begin implementation of the CARS administrative database system. At about the same time the faculty approved the major in Computer Science and he continued to offer courses as time permitted. Based on his experience in ITS, he was able to introduce courses covering database systems and networking to the program.
As the responsibilities of the ITS department have expanded over the years, it has been increasingly difficult for Professor Moore to juggle the additional demands of classroom teaching. It was with some reluctance that he informed the program committee that he would no longer be able to offer his popular courses. He will be missed by his colleagues and students alike. However, we look forward to his continued input on the program committee.
CSC 336 Software Engineering ran in Spring 2009 and provides a tale to tell. The students (Scott Albertine, Elizabeth Denny, Brittany Devine, David Fritz, Carol Hummel, Conor Mather-Licht, Jessica Szweda, and Alex Wegener) focused on one major project, a game called Galaxy Sleuth. This is a client server representation of the classic board game Clue, recast to take place in space. With many hours of effort and a number of meals shared in the lab the students delivered a solid, working result. By the end of the term other students were able to come and enjoy playing a compete game. The 336 students were justifiably proud of their effort and result.
Galaxy Sleuth is a project from the text Project Based Software Engineering by Stiller & LeBlanc.This was the first time a single cohort of students arrived in 336 with the necessary collection of skills to tackle this project. Basic coding, user interface and network coding were all requisite skills. There were significant risk factors. The project was unusually large in scope – the students turned in 36 Java class files. The team size of 8 was twice anything we had tried before. It is fair to say that there was as much team building as coding required. While the API and the Eclipse environment we used were already familiar, we added Subversion to the mix of tools.
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| Developers Carol Hummel and Elizabeth Denny prepare for users to test the project. Decorations and food were part of the celebration. | Mary Takhtjian and Sarah Humphrey joined developers Alex Wegener, Conor Mather-Licht and Carol Hummel in testing the game. |
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| Developer Brittany Devine logs into the game. | Drew McKinney helps with user testing as developer Jessica Szweda looks on. |
Note: Some of these messages came right after the last newsletter went out in the winter-- so the news may be old -- people may be in new jobs -- but I sure enjoyed hearing from all these former students and hope you do too.
Chris Nash ('97) wrote "In April, I accepted a position as a consultant for Southern Graphics Systems. They are in the process of retiring their aging software systems, and my team is tasked with integrating the newer systems into their architecture. The applications are all AJAX/ASP.NET, written in C# with SQL Server back-ends. "
Stephen Calender ('06) and his partners had to retire Semiotic Technologies, the company for which he served as chief engine architect, but not before they completed a project for the White House Historical Association. He wrote: 'it looks like they recently updated their website, our project that was finished in Febuary is still featured, here is the direct link: http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_tours/lincoln_whitehouse/index.html " Currently he is a Flash Programmer at a company called NetDevil http://www.netdevil.com/ where he is working on project called Lego Universe http://universe.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx?domainredir=www.legouniverse.com. You can view his programming blog at http://www.stephencalenderblog.com/
Anthony Lippert ('07) has accepted a position as a software engineer for L-3 Communications, at Bluegrass Station just outside of Lexington. "I will work along with electrical and mechanical engineers, producing training simulators for Apache helicopter pilots and maintenence workers. The simulator is a full cockpit with all of the controls and screens, with an image projected in front of the simulated surroundings.. and all of this is connected to a computer network to run it. One of their concerns is converting the implementation to C++. It is now mostly ADA, and uses a long list of other languages. "Peter Burns ('07) has one more semester left to complete a Master's degree at the University of San Francisco. He has recently completed a directed study with Terrence Parr to implement a grammar preprocessor, which adds Precedence Climbing Expression Parsing to ANTLR. "The practical upshot of this is that the expression parsing code of an ANTLR grammar can be much shorter and more readable. As an example, the parser for the Java language went from >190 lines dedicated to expressions to just over 40. " He will be giving a presentation on it at the ANTLR Conference 2009. The project lives at http://github.com/rictic/ANTLR-Precedence-Climbing/
When not in class he continues his work at Metaweb, working on a client-side next generation reconciliation system. A (very) early version can be seen here: http://data.labs.freebase.com/recon/recon.html
Brian Dougherty ('07) Brian is the co-developer of Gwigo, an interactive social mapping tool. Gwigo integrates Google Appengine, Google Maps, Google Web Toolkit, and facebook. The site has a rapidly growing user base and needs you to be a part of it by visiting http://apps.facebook.com/gwigomap/ for access via facebook.
Jackie Soennecker ('08) will be spending part of the summer as a teaching assistant for the "Foundations of Programming" class during two sessions (6 weeks) at Lafayette College in Easton, PA in July and August. She writes "Getting smart kids excited about CS seems an awesome way to spend the summer, and I'm really excited about it!" She will be returning to Purdue in the fall to complete work on her Master's degree.
Lisa Brown ('04) graduated with a Master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University and accepted a job as an associate designer with Insomniac Games. During her spring internship at Schell Games she was engaged in design work on the Disney Fairies MMO, Pixie Hollow.
Now we need to hear from you. Please send items for the next issue to Christine Shannon