teaching machines

Modeling a Jump Sound

I recently unveiled Earpiece as a playground for exploring how sounds are shaped by their frequency and amplitude envelopes. Today we use it to explore a jump sound. First, close your eyes. Imagine you are holding a game controller. Press the jump button. Wrong one. Try again. That’s right. What did you hear? We can […]

Avisual Maze

Around the same time that I discovered 3D printers, I ran across this compendium of maze algorithms by Jamis Buck. Just as our stomachs unite the various dishes of a meal into a puddle of nutrients, so my brain united these two ideas into a puddle of … plastic. I had long wondered how a […]

Font Diner Workshop

Three years ago I was standing in the pickup line at school waiting to collect my children. I recognized the guy next to me as the father of a kid that my son was partnering with on a project, so I struck up a conversation. I try very hard to avoid the “What do you […]

Modeling a Coin Pickup Sound

Years ago I ran across sfxr, a little tool for generating sound effects. Seven classes of sounds can be generated: coin pickups, shots, explosions, powerups, hits, jumps, and blips. The author, DrPetter, made the tool to support folks like me who don’t have the time, skill, or team to make sounds for their games. But […]

Moment of Glory

It was my first semester of graduate school. We were in a lecture for CS 530: Computer Architecture. Dr. Ward had two announcements. First, a midterm was coming up. Second, the annual departmental mug design contest was accepting submissions. An alumnus donated money each year to purchase mugs for all the graduating students, faculty, and […]

Hoarding and Herding

There’s a pandemic happening right now. At times like this, we get to see both the best and the worst in people. One of the worst things in us is rugged individualism, which leads us to buy more than our share of toilet paper. We were legitimately running low this week, and I grew concerned […]

The Law of Doubled Digit Transposition Over Multiplication

My son is learning long division at school. He was intimidated by it, so we started practicing for just a few minutes every day after school. The format is simple: I generate two numbers, a big dividend and a small divisor, and he divides them. One day I wanted the quotient to be 99 because […]

CS 268: Lecture 12 – Forms and Web Services

Dear students: Last time we started looking at how JavaScript brings actions into normally sedate HTML. We used it to dynamically generate an HTML structure. Today we look at using JavaScript to deal with form input. We’ll also use it to get content from external sources. In particular, we’ll generate a web application for consuming […]

All Your Base

America may not have metric, but at least we have hexadecimal. This sign appears near Green Bay in eastern Wisconsin.

CS 268: Lecture 11 – Media Queries and JavaScript

Dear students: Last week we started making our web pages sensitive to their presentation environment using media queries. We continue that discussion today and formally break into a discussion of Javascript. Media Queries We saw last time the mechanism for expressing conditional CSS via media queries. A primary use of media queries is to support […]

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