Submitted by paul.craven on Fri, 08/12/2011 - 22:05
What do our students do? After only one semester of programming, they are creating video games. They are creating 3D movies in their first year. By their second year they are developing apps for smart phones and websites. They are interning at the National Security Agency, Hy-Vee's tech department, the State of Iowa, Holmes Murphy, and many other companies! In their senior year they work on capstone projects.
Students in CIS 300, Project Management, took some time recently to learn how to conduct an interview. They learned several basic interview skills including: how to create interview forms, how to select areas to interview candidates on, and what kinds of questions to ask and not ask. Students then did mock interviews to apply their new skills and worked on refining their interviewing technique.
Students in the CIS 300 Project Management class decided to teach a group of Boy Scouts about Lego robotics. Students in the project management class are using the project management skills they learned to work together as a team and put on a program for Boy Scouts. In the photo below, the students are preparing to teach the meeting by familiarizing themselves with the robots.
This semester, Dr. Craven’s Simpson Colloquium class is learning about designing video games, and writing specifications for them. This freshman-level class helps students learn college-level critical thinking and writing skills in the context of creating video games. Recently, the students reviewed each other’s specifications for the settings of their video games, similar to reviewing the settings of each other’s stories.
Joseph Mather is a senior Computer Information Systems and Business Management: Finance and Insurance major with a minor in Philosophy. He completed a Web Development internship at Marsh and McLennan.
During the summer of 2011, Simpson College Computer Science students Ethan Eller and Robert Trimble interned as software developers for the State of Iowa Legislative Service Agency - Computer Services Division. Robert and Ethan worked with a wide variety of software development platforms. Projects included developing web applications using ASP.NET 4.0, SQL Database management, Microsoft Reporting Services, and creating windows applications using the new Windows Presentation Foundation.
On Tuesday, September 20th, computer science students, faculty, and enthusiasts had a cook-out at Dr. Van Wyk’s house. It was a great opportunity for all the computer science students to get to know one another, and good times were had by all!
This past summer, Blaise Mikels and Hannah Benson completed computer science internships.
Blaise Mikels is a senior Math and Computer Science major with Economics and Ethics minors. He completed an intensive 12 week math and computer science internship. He worked with another intern and collaborated with a few full-time employees on a problem that involved some algorithm analysis. When asked about his time at the internship, Blaise replied “It was a very neat experience, and I was amazed at how much I learned in just three months. I was challenged intellectually every day, but I left the internship feeling like I made a lot of good progress on the project I worked on.”
Hannah Benson is a senior Math and Computer Science major. She completed a computer science internship this summer doing web development programming and developed an Android mobile phone app. She is also currently working at a computer science internship for John Deere. For the internship Hannah is currently doing, “[Hannah has] been updating and redesigning John Deere’s employee webpage. Working at John Deere has helped to teach me how to apply what I have learned in school in the real world, and has [taught] me that I will never stop learning.”
Simpson Colloquium is an introductory college course that seeks to help new students in the transition to college life during their first semester on campus. In addition to class, students participate in other activities focused on engaged citizenship, like community service projects.
Today I got an e-mail from a recruiter in Des Moines. It started with:
Hello everyone!
Every quarter I seem to ask the SAME question. Where are all the java developers??? With 18 years in this business under my belt it's never seemed so tight around our town.
2011 Chris
Information Systems and Technology Specialist at Rounds and Associates.
"Work is great, doing C# programming for windows apps, and ASP.NET for some of our websites."
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2011 survey for the best paid majors puts computer science as #2. Computer Information Systems comes in at #8. All of the top 10 degrees are technology related. See the top ten here.
These students had three weeks during May 2011 to learn how to use 3D modeling software, create and render still images or animations. All the movies created in the class are shown below:
Students in the introductory programming class at Simpson College used Python and Pygame to create video games for their final projects. Check out this video of their projects:
Submitted by mark.brodie on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 14:35
On April 21 Professor Jim Lathrop of Iowa State led a workshop at Simpson to demonstrate the use of tile-assembly software developed at their Laboratory for Nanoscale Self-Assembly. Our students were extremely enthused and were soon busily getting binary counters, Sierpinski triangles and carpets, and Fibonacci numbers to self-assemble. More pictures to follow...
This year's programming contest was a huge success for the Simpson College teams.
On Friday April 8 six students participated in the programming contest at the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, Duluth, MN - Jaris Van Maanen, Joel Gawarecki, Whitney Thompson, Adam Smith, Blaise Mikels and Zach Huebener.
Out of 45 teams, Jaris Van Maanen, Joel Gawarecki and Whitney Thompson got the 5th place. Adam Smith, Blaise Mikels and Zach Huebener got the 9th place. Both teams solved 3 out of 7 problems.
Professor Craven gave a presentation on the "Dark Side of Service Oriented Architecture" at the DAMA meeting in Des Moines on March 17. Slides from the talk are available here.
As the mobile app business expands, several of Simpson’s computer science students took to the challenge of writing and programing their own iPhone applications.
Submitted by paul.craven on Mon, 12/20/2010 - 11:19
Students in Dr. Craven's introduction to programming class create video games as their final project. A selection of these games is now available for download! Click here to download and install the games! Or click here to see a video of last semester's games.
Games include:
AstroSmash! - Shoot incoming astroids. Higher levels include cruise missles and alien ships with guided bombs. (Note: hit a key to
Breakout - A twist on the old classic breakout game.
Submitted by paul.craven on Tue, 12/14/2010 - 10:25
Simpson College students in the 2010 Fall semester of the introductory programming class created video games for their final project. The students in this class start with no programming experience, and end the class by creating a simple video game using the Python programming language that can be installed and run on most computers. Here is a video showing their final submissions.
Submitted by paul.craven on Fri, 12/10/2010 - 10:28
By: Grant Rodgers: Students in Assistant Professor Paul Craven’s Project Management class finished a semester long project on Wednesday, December 1 when they taught the technology badge to a group of Indianola Girl Scouts. The goal of the project was to give students experience in working with teams in a manner similar to what they will face in a future workplace.
By: Grant Rodgers: In the fall of 2009, Simpson seniors of all different majors came together in one of the college’s many collaborative project classes. Professor Paul Craven’s senior colloquium, focused on designing video games.
Craven intentionally brought together a group of students with diverse majors to get a wide perspective and skill set to create the games.
Simpson College had six students participate in the MICS programming contest. This contest had Simpson students compete against other colleges. Our teams placed 21st and 23rd out of 40 total teams. This was the first time competing Simpson College in this contest.
During May Term 2010, Aren Olson, Ethan Eller, and Robert Trimble used a small embedded computer and multitudes of sensors to control a small electric powered helicopter.
The project helped students learn to work servos, sensors using low-level C programming.
This April Carl Davidson presented a paper “Identifying Gene Regulatory Networks Using Evolutionary Algorithms” at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. He also presented a paper on “Text-based Markov Models Using a Sequence Alignment Algorithm” in Wisconsin earlier this year.
Students in Professor Craven's May 2010 class created 3D movies using the software program Blender. May term is a three week period where students dedicate themselves to only one class. During this time, students in Dr. Craven's class learned how to model, animate, and render 3D movies.
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During May Term 2010, Aren Olson, Ethan Eller, and Robert Trimble used a small embedded computer and multitudes of sensors to control a small electric powered helicopter.
This April Carl Davidson presented a paper “Identifying Gene Regulatory Networks Using Evolutionary Algorithms” at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. He also presented a paper on “Text-based Markov Models Using a Sequence Alignment Algorithm” in Wisconsin earlier this year.
Students in Professor Craven's May 2010 class created 3D movies using the software program Blender. May term is a three week period where students dedicate themselves to only one class. During this time, students in Dr. Craven's class learned how to model, animate, and render 3D movies.
