TeacherTalk - Classroom Collaboration

This video was produced by Columbus Academy as the first in a series of videos called "TeacherTalk." Here I am talking about collaboration in my computer science classes.

3D Pong with a Kinect

If you saw the post about Semi-Virtual Air Hockey, you know how much I love putting things together in new ways. Here is a fun project that my Advanced Topics in Computer Science class just wrapped up. They took a Kinect device and plugged it into a computer rather than an Xbox 360. Then they wrote pong but separated the colors so that when you put on 3D glasses it appears that the ball is coming out of the screen at you. You wave your hand around in the air to control the paddle, which also appears to be out of the screen.

Here is a short video they made highlighting the project:



Go Comp Sci!

A Student Created Video Game

"This is great!" one of my kids was saying.

All seven of my children were lined up in my computer lab playing a video game where I was the main character.

Sitting on the table behind them was Willy - a top student of mine who had written the game.

"It is not every day that you get to play a game where your dad is the hero," he said as he was drinking it all in.

Willy had every right to be proud. His game was not only a hit with my kids, but with many of the students at the school. They loved the personalization with pictures of different students as well as the boss on the last level - one of my greatest friends foes - Mr. O.

You can check out the game for yourself here.

Is that cheating?

“That’s cheating,” my son was telling me, although he had a grin on his face from ear to ear. He had come home from school with a fun math problem to do for kicks and I solved it in just a few minutes – by writing a program.

So are alternate solutions that use technology cheating? Does the creator of the solution demonstrate less skill when solving a problem in a way that the author of the problem did not think of? In some cases the answer seems to be clearly yes. I do not want my children using a calculator when they are trying to learn their math facts. However, in other cases I am not so sure.

Here is this problem and the alternate solution. You can be the judge if it is “cheating” or not.

Problem: What are three three-digit numbers where the second number is twice the first and the third number is three times the first. In addition, the three numbers together use every digit from 1-9 just once.

Solution via Java (this program actually found four different solutions):

import java.util.*;
public class FindNum
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        for(int x=100; x<1000/3; x++)
        {
            int y = x*2;
            int z = x*3;

            //Throw each digit into a set
            //Note: Sets ignore duplicate valules
            Set<Integer> digitSet = new TreeSet<Integer>();
            digitSet.add(x/100);
            digitSet.add(x/10%10);
            digitSet.add(x%10);
            digitSet.add(y/100);
            digitSet.add(y/10%10);
            digitSet.add(y%10);
            digitSet.add(z/100);
            digitSet.add(z/10%10);
            digitSet.add(z%10);
            //if there are nine digits in the set and no
            //zero, we win!
            if(digitSet.size()==9&&!digitSet.contains(0))
            {
                System.out.println(x);
                System.out.println(y);
                System.out.println(z);
                System.out.println();
            }                  
        }
    }
}

Creativity in this Modern Age

I love it when someone surprises me by assembling some common items into something new and exciting. Like, for example, sending one’s iPhone to space.

Last year the Advanced Topics in Computer Science class that I teach had one of those creative moments. We installed infrared diodes into the top of air hockey pushers and then used a Wii remote to track them. This allowed us to play a “semi-virtual air hockey” game that the students wrote where there were real pushers but the puck was virtual. Here is a video of the project.



A special thanks to Zalika C. for putting this video together.