Stella
Homework assignments usually start brewing in my head well before I actually assign them. Stella, for instance, was born last fall but won’t be assigned until next fall. I also need about that much time to respond to an email. Stella is a kaleidoscopic drawing application. The user draws on a canvas, and the drawn […]
Pixelated Sphere
I don’t know exactly what magic is made of, but I’m pretty sure it’s spheres. No matter where you stand on a sphere’s surface, you see change. Yet the same change happens everywhere. No point is better than other—until you shine a light on it. But the sphere won’t let the light play favorites. It […]
Pixelated Crate
My 8- and 6-year-old sons and I have been playing EvoLand 2. The game cutely blends action RPGs with platformers with shmups with infinite runners with tactical RPGs with fighting games with menu-based RPGs. Somehow they even squeezed in Snake, Pong, and Pac-Man. Apart from the varied gameplay, EvoLand 2 has inspired us to make […]
Button
Two days before the semester started, I had one of those first-day-of-teaching nightmares. Sure enough, my wardrobe malfunctioned. This dream was probably inspired by my real pair of pants that had lost a button. When I told my wife about the dream, she offered to fix the pants. I told her the button was on […]
Crate
There’s something magical about wooden crates. Here’s a little program that recreates that magic on a small scale by subtracting away some triangular prisms from each face of a cube: I printed the model in wood filament, and I can almost see a miniature dock worker sitting on it and eating his lunch: A miniature […]
Eyes Saw a Mouse
Mostly I made this because I miss solving math problems.
Tic Tac Plus
I’ve been reading through Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, and one of the exercises is to extend Tic-Tac-Toe to three players. One of the least satisfying aspects of Tic-Tac-Toe is its predictable outcome (a tie), so I decided to let the third player shake things up a bit by shifting the board left, right, up, […]
Speed Coding in Madeup: D6 Edition
I have n ideas in my head of things I want to make in Madeup, and they are starting to fight with each other for my attention. I think it’s time to send some of them packing. Here’s one of them: a speed coding of the obligatory six-sided die.
Rule #37 for Teaching Computer Science
Never use placeholders. For example, never tell students to change directories with a command like this: cd /home/USERNAME Students will report back that the directory /home/USERNAME did not exist, and they were therefore not able to do their homework. Do not describe an image file format to students like this: P1 WIDTH HEIGHT … Students […]
Letter of Reference
Dear ██████, I am writing on behalf of ██████, a former student of mine who is ready to strike out on his own after graduating this May. He has applied at your company for a Software Engineer III position and has asked me to provide a letter of reference. I wish to recommend him without […]