Computer Science Department

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.