Photos from class August 1-5, 2005
Monday, August 1, 2005
The girls learned about the difficulty of writing complete
instructions, much like a computer program, by writing instructions
for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They were divided into
3 groups, wrote the instructions, then switched instructions and
assembled the sandwiches according to another team's interpretation of
the instructions. Here are some photos from the event:
Tuesday AM, August 2nd
ALICE - The girls spent the morning learning a graphical computing
environment called ALICE, learning about methods, logical order, and the
difficulties of graphics programming.
Tuesday, PM
The girls had their first opportunity to tear down a computer, see
what was inside, and learn about all the internal parts. The computer
they were studying was missing a major part, and they had to figure out what
part was missing. They used schematics, and spent time investigating
on the web. Here are some of the pictures as they attacked that
machine!
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
On Wednesday morning we prepared for our guest speaker, Mary Swift,
who was to talk to us about how computers understand spoken language.
We called the Amtrak reservation line, "an automated speech assistant"
to see what type of problems the computers would have understanding
us. Holly tried first, and because the phone was too far away from
her mouth, it didn't understand her. Ambika seemed more at ease with
the phone in a natural position, and had better luck being heard, not
necessary understood!
Wednesday PM:
Logic Puzzles! We also put our creative side to work brainstorming a
way to overcome media perceptions of computer scientists. The
ideas were flowing for our new character who will change the world, one
episode at a time!
Thursday, August 4
Today we went to the virtual reality lab, and learned about visual
perception. Everyone got to participate in some virtual reality
demonstrations including the haptic force feedback robots and walking
in the virtual town. They also met with Jelena Jovancevic, a graduate
student from Brain & Cognitive Science to discuss her work, and her
path of studies that helped her arrive at studying perception in the
world of virtual reality. Here are some pictures from Thursday:
