QA76 Blog Posts
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Course Planning with Team Gantt
Planning out my syllabi for courses has always been a tedious exercise. It all starts out well; for a new course, I look at the calendar for that semester, and...
Civic Hacking Lab - Experience Report
And last, in this push of blog posts, an update on the Civic Hacking lab I revised earlier in the year. My colleagues tried it out in December as the...
Mardi Gras Playtesting
I was finally able to get in another visit in December to the Little Rock Game Designers to test out my Mardi Gras board game, as you can see below....
New Blog - The Shape of Card Games
I spent much of November coding up new card games in RECYCLE for my CardStock research project. I finally felt like I had enough diverse games to start analyzing and...
Ludum Dare 43 - What We Hold In Our Hearts
Just posted this over at LDJAM.com, it’s a post-mortem account of my creation of What We Hold In Our Hearts for Ludum Dare 43 back in December. This is my...
Bunny Kiss Working Demo
I’ve reached a milestone in my development of Bunny Kiss, finally laying out sensible levels for a tutorial, and it is ready for early playtesting! Here is a link to...
Bunny Kiss Progress
My big goal for October is to complete a full game in Unity, with working tutorial, GUI, high scores, animations, particle effects, etc. Most games I have made have just...
Oculus Rift VR Space Setup
Part of my sabbatical project is learning new game development skills, and one I’m really excited about is programming in virtual reality in Unity. After a bit of searching, I...
Ludum Dare and Game Development Courses
I was lucky to attend the Game Developers Conference in 2017 for the Education Summit. I learned about how other educators were approaching their courses, and the wider pathways for...
Procedural Puzzle Challenge Generation in Fujisan Submitted
I spent most of September thinking about Fujisan. As I mentioned in an earlier post on board game designs, my friend James was interested in the percentage of random board...
SIGCSE Civic Engagement Panel Accepted
Hooray, my panel proposal for SIGCSE 2019 was accepted! I’ll be moderating a discussion about “Civic Engagement Across the Computing Curriculum” with Michael Goldweber, Matthew Jadud, S. Monisha Pulimood, and...
LDJam Update
It’s been over a month since my last update. I’ve had my head down on some projects, but wanted to take some time today to make some posts on my...
Civic Hacking - Conway Tornado Sirens
I’m working on a panel proposal for SIGCSE 2019 with the topic of “Civic Engagement Across the Computing Curriculum.” I sent out an email to the SIGCSE mailing list asking...
Ludum Dare 42: Baggage Claim Post-Mortem
My Ludum Dare 42 entry Baggage Claim is complete! It’s a stressful microgame where you must clear luggage as fast as you can. Each new bag must be shifted on...
Prototyping and Playtesting
I spent my June journeying back to board game design, both physically and mentally. In graduate school, designing board games became my major hobby, and I made many excellent friends...
Computing Patterns in The Wheel of Time - Part 5: Topic Modeling
Finally, to wrap up my dive into the Wheel of Time series using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, today I’ll show the results of Probabilistic Topic Modeling, to reveal some...
Computing Patterns in The Wheel of Time - Part 4: Word2Vec Relationships
So far, we’ve looked at using word clouds and character rankings, and document similarity, but there are a few more NLP tools left to use in our analysis of The...
Computing Patterns in The Wheel of Time - Part 3: Hierarchical Clustering
For our next analytical approach to The Wheel of Time series, following word clouds and character rankings, we will look at how to cluster the novels. This will involve a...
Computing Patterns in The Wheel of Time - Part 2: Character Ranking
Wherein I continue my investigate of the Wheel of Time through natural language processing. Finally seeing the word clouds in the last post all together inspired me to explore the...
Computing Patterns in The Wheel of Time - Part 1: Word Clouds
We covered a fair amount of Natural Language Processing in my recent Computational Humanities course this spring. As our running example text, I used selections from the epic fantasy series...
Blog Reformatting and Rejuvenating
It’s been a few years, and with my recent site css refresh, it was time to restart the blog. I’ve made the jump to using Jekyll on Github pages, which...
Adding Tension and Excitement to Group Presentations
In my Theory of Computing course, student presentations comprise a major portion of our class time. In the past, I assigned a set of problems, and then in class I...
Tuesday Talk
Last month, I was invited to give a Tuesday Talk here at Hendrix, a series of talks about vocation and calling, going on now for about a decade. Each invitee...
In college, I browsed the bookstore and library quite a bit as a hobby. On one trip in particular during my senior year, I remember finding Artificial Intelligence : A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. Besides kicking off my interest in AI which would eventually turn into my Ph.D. thesis, I for some reason memorized the first portion of the Library of Congress Classification, QA76. This alphanumeric code became a signpost for me: Q for Science, A for Mathematics, and 76 for Computer Science. When I would spot it on a book, almost always I would find something of interest within.
This blog is an exploration of my interests in computer science, education, complexity, and game design, mostly sticking to topics in the QA76 category, thus the name of the blog. I hope to talk about my current work, both research projects and classroom pedagogy, but also reflect on current computing issues and links that fascinate me.
Acknowledgements
Here’s a list of references I found helpful in setting up and formatting this blog.