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IMPRINT Program Leaves its Mark |
Two freshmen computer science students received a jump start on the
fall semester by attending the 2004 Illinois Minority Pre-College
Internship (IMPRINT)
summer program offered by the College of Engineering. Participants
lived in a dorm, attended summer school. They also worked on a
research project with two CS professors, Lenny Pitt and Cinda
Heeren.
Jovany Chaidez and Luiz Mendes teamed with Alan Perez-Rathke, senior
in CS, who served as their mentor for the summer. Their project was
to create an innovative method to introduce a topic in CS to grade, middle or high school students. The trio
brainstormed for ideas and came up with an arcade game, Logic Hunt.
”We wanted to make learning fun and exciting while encouraging
interest in CS by K-12 students,” said Chaidez.
“An interactive game fit all of the criteria. It was a team effort;
we all learned from each other,” added Mendes.
Their Tetris-like game teaches the player basic concepts of
prepositional logic using animation and color. Logical expressions
appear as blocks that can be controlled by the player as they fall
from the top of the frame. As the player positions the blocks to
form a true logical expression in the horizontal or vertical
direction they gain points and the expression block disappears. The
greater the points; the harder and faster the game becomes. If they
let blocks reach the top of the frame, the game is over.
Chaidez, who had taken a visual basic course while at Fenton High
School, came up with the idea of an arcade game as a vehicle to
their learning program. Mendes, who had taken C++ during his
sophomore year at Urbana High School and was currently taking a CS
course in summer school, worked on the coding. Perez-Rathke, with
many CS courses behind him, helped them with the structure and
algorithms.
The team decided to use Macromedia’s Flash program for Logic Hunt’s
animation. None of them had experience using Flash or the underlying
ActionScript programming language. They combined their previous
programming experience with what they learned through books and
online tutorials to begin programming their game.
“I was so impressed with the IMPRINT students' creativity,
curiosity, and independence,” said Cinda Heeren. “They took the seed
of an idea and turned it into something that will actually be useful
to future CS 173 students!”
The freshmen enjoyed the experience of working as a team and
interacting with the Professors Pitt and Heeren. Both agreed that
this project would help them with future classes; developing a
project from scratch was an invaluable learning experience. Little
did they know that their familiarity of campus and perhaps a little
of the Boolean Logic garnered during summer school might help their
teams locate buildings and solve clues during the CS freshmen
scavenger hunt. |
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To test your
logic skills, take shot at Logic Hunt.
http://icarus.cs.uiuc.edu/LogicHunt/LogicHunt.html |
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