zethrae.us/blog

[this is a repost from my posterous. i have yet to decide properly which type of content will sit where. sorry for the dupe.]

Brown shipped off a bunch of my good friends and workmates from the Brown CS TA scene to Seattle this summer. For once it was a group of computer scientists within which a healthy proportion (I’m guestimating about half, but I sadly wasn’t out there… this year) were female.

The article is a bit disingenuous when it groups rising Juniors and rising Seniors into one group of ‘juniors’ but is nevertheless worth a read. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/aug10/08-13browninterns.mspx…

We’re sadly in no way this equally balanced within CS at Brown in general but within the TAing group they are much better represented percentage-wise.

Its a nice article to see but it still annoys the hell out of me that the situation is remarkable enough to be written about.

Presenting… every skit filmed during Brown’s CS intro course CS15 in fall 2009.

They’ve been a while coming but I’m thrilled to finally have them online for anyone to see. The atmosphere and attitude captured in these videos is probably unique to, and more importantly absolutely ubiquitous within, CS15.

Opening Day Skit

The skit showed/acted on the first day of class. Star Trek themed (as was the course and website) in 2009. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Collaboration Policy Skit

3 short filmed skits animating the course’s collaboration policy. Written by the 2009 Humor TAs.

Star-crossed References

An in class skit personifying some of the aspects of programming and the Java environment. Includes variable scope, garbage collection, references and constants. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Slush Gray

In class, Snow White themed skit. Has a linked list. The skit is a long-standing CS15 feature. Presumably written by TAs who’ve long since graduated.

Othello

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Othello’ in which students make the board game Othello and implement a minimax based AI.

Adventure

The skit written and preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Adventure’ in which students make a 3d randomly generating objective based maze game.

Sketchy

The skit preformed on film by the group of TAs responsible for the final project ‘Sketchy’ in which students make a basic graphics editing program. Written by previous years’ TAs.

Credits

The credits reel for all of the videos included on the DVD from which they were ripped.

Bloopers

Bloopers reel from lots of the above videos. » Read the rest of this entry «

I wrote and acted in this skit for CS4 at Brown. Cs4 is an intro level CS course for likely non-concentrators (i.e. engineers). In it, we cover a whole bunch of Matlab and a small amount of C.

The skit is about pointers and is set in the Mushroom kingdom… It’s nowhere near as hardcore as the stuff that we did for CS15 but it’s my baby, so here it is.

Script after the break. » Read the rest of this entry «