|
May 2008
The 2008 Lloyd Fosdick Award, intended to recognize exemplary
collaborative projects that include Computer Science undergraduates as
participants, was recently announced. This year's winning project was
Picasso: Super Doodle -- A Web-Based Freehand Drawing Tool.
Project team members were undergraduate Computer Science majors
Brent Abbott,
Teja Basava,
Sean Hume and
William Troxel.
Boulder-based Kerpoof LLC has created the
www.kerpoof.com kids'
website, which is "all about having fun, discovering things, and being
creative". The site allows kids to create movies, stories and drawings
and to share them with other kids. Kerpoof requested the development of
a new drawing program,
Super Doodle,
that could be incorporated into the Kerpoof website.
Super Doodle is a web-based, freehand drawing program for kids
-- but with a big twist. In addition to supporting all of the usual
features of drawing programs such as save/load, undo/redo, clear, print,
erase, fill, copy, color and pen size selection, move, and, of course,
freehand drawing with the mouse, Super Doodle allows users
with little drawing skill to create smooth, high-quality sketches.
It does this by analyzing a user's mouse strokes to find various
geometric features such as lines, curves, and angles, and then
intelligently smoothes the results -- jagged edges become straight
lines and rounded bends become perfect curves.
Further, Super Doodle employs a number of "shape detectors" to
determine a user's intention to draw a particular shape, rather than
requiring the user to explicitly indicate their intention by selecting
a specific tool. Roughly drawn rectangles morph into perfect rectangles
as do similarly squares, triangles, ellipses, circles, diamonds,
kite-shapes, and stars; scribbling over a previously drawn closed shape
results in the shape being filled with the color of the pen. The degree
of correction can be user-controlled from no correction to always
drawing "perfect" lines, curves and shapes.
Although originally planned simply as a proof-of-concept application,
instead Super Doodle has been fully integrated it into all
facets of Kerpoof's production website. Since this integration,
Super Doodle has rapidly become one of Kerpoof's most popular
products, with users filling the "shared scenes" section with
amazingly-creative doodles.
The project also won a
"Best of Section Award"
at the Spring 2008 Engineering Design Expo.
Picasso was one of eleven projects completed in Computer Science
Senior Projects (CSCI 4308-CSCI 4318)
during the 2007-2008 academic year. The Senior Projects course was taught
by Bruce Sanders along with teaching
assistants Guy Cobb and
Karie Shipley.
The
Undergraduate Committee
wishes to congratulate the winners, as well as two other excellent teams
that were also nominated for the award:
Discovery of HuR Binding Sites Using a Machine Learning Approach
Jon Miller
and
Paul Johnson
(nominated by Debra Goldberg)
Banga: Android-Based Delivery of Aphasia Therapy
Branden Conley,
Brian Freeman,
Daniel Maples,
and
Jessica (Jessa) Rothenberg
(nominated by Clayton Lewis)
This annual award is named for former Department Chair
Lloyd Fosdick. Nominations for the award come
from Computer Science faculty directing group projects, with the
Undergraduate Committee
selecting the award-winning project from those nominated each year. Each
undergraduate student in the award-winning group will receive a $50 prize.
|
