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April 2008
More than 40 Computer Science seniors exhibited their projects at the Spring
2008 Engineering Design Expo, held recently in the Integrated Teaching and
Learning Laboratory. These students are members of eleven teams completing
Senior Projects (CSCI 4308-CSCI 4318) this year.
Ninety-six projects from throughout the College were exhibited at the expo.
Two Computer Science Senior Projects received "Best in Section" awards.
This recognition was given by industry judges based on interviews with each
project team, demonstrations of each project, and evaluation of each project's
results by the judges. Winners of this award for Computer Science were
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Picasso - Super Doodle: A Web-Based Freehand Drawing Tool
sponsored by Kerpoof LLC
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.
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COWAbunga - Scheduling System for the Conference on World Affairs
sponsored by Conference on World Affairs
The Annual Conference on World Affairs is a conference on "Everything
Conceivable", including music, literature, environment, science,
journalism, visual arts, diplomacy, technology, spirituality, the film
industry, politics, business, medicine, human rights and more. It is
held in Boulder every year in the month of April and is completely free
to the general public. The conference consists of approximately 100
participants from around the world who speak in various panels
discussing cross-disciplinary subjects.
Scheduling the conference each year is a complicated process. Conference
coordinators must be concerned, for instance, with ever-changing
panelist and venue availability, associating moderators and producers
with each panel, avoiding scheduling panelists for too many (or too few)
panels or for panels that are too close together (in time) or too far
apart (in space). In addition, the schedule can be somewhat fluid,
requiring changes late into the scheduling process.
For 60 years, this scheduling process has used a labor-intensive pencil
and paper method. The COWAbunga system replaces that with a web-based
system that allows conference coordinators to create conferences and
then to add panels and venues to them. Panelists, moderators and
producers can then be added to these panels. The system not only
prevents problems such as scheduling a panelist in multiple panels at
the same time, but also warns the coordinator of any "conflicts"
(such as a panelist being scheduled for too many or too few panels,
a panel that has no moderator, or a panel composed of all "rookie"
panelists). Such conflicts are immediately detected whenever they
occur, allowing the coordinator to address the issue as they see fit.
The Senior Projects course was taught by
Bruce Sanders along with teaching assistants
Guy Cobb and
Karie Shipley.
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