teaching machines

University of Canterbury Seminar

Hi, I’m Chris and I teach people to teach machines. But I am a reluctant computer scientist. Sometimes I get concerned that the thing I know the most about is not directly linked to my survival. My father knew how to keep machines running. My wife grows vegetables. In a post-apocalyptic world, they would be […]

Landing in the Credits: Stories from Game Makers

I’ve been asked to serve on a panel at a GEEKCon that some folks at my university are putting on. The title is Landing in the Credits, and the panelists are students and alumni who have built games. I share here some notes on my contributions as moderator. Here we are at GEEKCon 2017 celebrating […]

Toward Blocks-Text Parity

I gave a talk on a paper that a student and I wrote at COMPSAC 2017 in Torino, Italy. Our work was a position paper responding to the folks who say that blocks programming languages are going to take over the world. These people do exist. The following is a rough manuscript of my talk. […]

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 […]