Tiangle
Instrument #2 in my foray into Pure Data and Arduino is the tiangle (sic). We’ll use a potentiometer to slur the emitted pitch up and down. When musicians play notes with no break between, we call that a tie. Our instrument will tie together different angles or rotations of the potentiometer. Thus, tiangle. Technically, ties […]
Hexaflexagoner
On Christmas day, my 9-year-old handed me an envelope. In it was his gift for me: his two best hexaflexagons. What’s a hexaflexagon, you might ask? Vi Hart will tell you: She has more videos and patterns. My son and I wanted to make our own pattern like the fidget spinner one she provides, but […]
Generating Cool Circuits
A few years ago my mother gave us this Cool Circuits puzzle: If I chain together the individual links into a complete circuit, a small fanfare of lights and sounds is produced. That is, it used to work that way. Moths and rust have had their way with the internals. There are metal wires running […]
Cratewalk
Random walks have fascinated me the past few months. As someone who plans weeks and months ahead of time, I suppose I’m compensating a little. They let me take a walk on the wild side. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. But pure wildness isn’t very interesting—at least not for long. It […]
Clickaphone
This summer I’ll be helping high schoolers make musical instruments in a three-week long summer camp. This is how we’re describing the camp: Randomly pick a technology. Chances are that technology is either used to automate or to entertain. But computers are not just appliances for making our lives easier. Because they are programmable, we […]
CS 1: Final Exam
See the PDF.
A Selection of Commit Messages
It’s that time of year—that time when I read and share what my students have written throughout the semester for Git commit messages. There were 130 students and 7 homework assignments in the class, which makes for a lot of messages. I have pruned them considerably. The ones I have kept provide a reasonable snapshot […]
CS 1: Lecture 38 – Binary Search
Dear students, We close our semester today with a discussion of finding things quickly with the binary search. We will illustrate the algorithm and implement it in the context of a dictionary/spell-checker. Earlier in the semester we discussed the linear search. Let’s revisit that algorithm first by locating a spice in our spice rack. What […]
CS 396: Meeting 14 – Applied Data Consultants
Dear students, Today we welcome Marc Harter of Applied Data Consultants as our guest. When I first moved to this town, one of my students told me about this guy named Marc that he worked with. This Marc apparently had an amazing knowledge of web technologies, and most of it was self-taught. A little later […]
CS 1: Lecture 37 – Lights Out
Dear students, It’s the last week! Given that we’re all stressed and ready to be done, let’s play a game today. Just kidding, let’s make one instead. We’re going to implement Lights Out, which started off as a handheld game from Tiger Electronics: The game is played on a 5×5 grid of lights, some of […]