Barrel
Every school year I forward to The Summer of Really Learning 3D Modeling. Unfortunately, it keeps getting canceled—usually by equally good things. But I really can’t let September come around again and not have made any 3D models in a traditional modeling program. So, I watched an old video that I had saved and made […]
ITiCSE 2017 in Italy
At the end of each ITiCSE working group I’ve been involved in, I swear I will never do another. Writing a lengthy report with a bunch of other humans is incredibly exhausting, and the process usually causes me to lose faith in mankind. But inevitably, I sign up again the next year, because I can’t […]
Job-shadowing Mr. Kurt
Today I job-shadowed Mr. Kurt, a 4th and 5th grade teacher at the Chippewa Valley Montessori School. I am not looking to become an elementary school teacher. I just wanted to see how someone spends the entire day with such undeveloped brains and bodies. As a university professor, teachers of this age group instantly have […]
RGB Widget
I was sitting in a talk today when something made me think of how we represent colors in terms of red, green, and blue intensities. We often illustrate how these components mix together with a Venn diagram of three circles. The intersection of red and green is yellow, the intersection of green and blue is […]
Octajewel
Madeup has a good number of solidifiers, but I’m always encountering compelling algorithmic shapes that don’t like to be modeled out of cylinders, boxes, spheres, extrusions, or revolutions. This has led to the addition of parametric surfaces, boolean mesh operations, and metaballs. But none of these were up to task of modeling my three-year-old’s Duplo […]
Triswirl
A couple of months ago I had about 200 unread items in my Feedly “save for later” queue. The size of that pile told me that my life is not my own, that 9 months of the year I will be owned completely by work, that teachers don’t get to grow their brains. It’s how […]
SIGCSE 2017: Towards Computational Making with Madeup
I’m presenting Madeup at SIGCSE 2017 in Seattle, and I offer below the manuscript of my talk. Introduction Madeup is a tool I began building in 2013 in order to study and teach the algorithms of everyday objects. It’s a language for making things up—things that live in 3D space, things that I could print […]
Clockwork
My dream some day is to teach CS 491: Bad GUIs. We would learn the principles of good interface design by examining (and implementing!) terrible user interfaces. The first assignment would be to design an unreadable clock widget. Perhaps like this one: If it’s not terrible enough, reload the page. I saw a clock like […]
Hosting a Git Repository
When I first started learning Git, I was unimpressed by the notion of distributed version control. I felt and still feel that a central server hosting a project is important for the projects I work on, and I think the popularity of GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab confirms my belief. With these great services around acting […]
Parity Time
Right before each school year begins, my colleagues and I meet with our incoming first-year students. We show them around the building, introduce them to the student groups, and generally just try to be welcoming. This past year, I decided my contribution to this event would be a magic trick from CS Unplugged. Since one […]