The First-Ever EECS 183 Showcase was a Success

On Tuesday, December 16th, a number of students and professors attended the first-ever EECS 183 Showcase at Palmer Commons. Non-CS students from EECS 183, Elementary Programming Concepts, presented what they learned about CS this semester in a day-long showcase that featured 183 projects made by over 750 students. The class was taught by Dr. Mary Lou Dorf and Jeremy Gibson, as well as a number of computer science students who taught the discussion sections.

The students had six options for their final project.

1)  Arduino Micro Arcade: This involved creating a micro arcade machine using the Arduino microcontroller.

2) Creature Trainer: The students were presented with a Creature Trainer game, which is similar to the Pokemon Battle Tower, and were required to re-write the Trainer class with simple artificial intelligence that will play the game automatically.

3) Schedule Planning: They were tasked with creating a better schedule planning website for the University of Michigan, as well as add other features to the website.

4) Game of Life: This project was based on Conway’s Game of Life, which is an interactive program that simulates life using a grid of cells. The cells can change to an “alive” or “dead” state with each passing generation, based on a set of rules regarding the cell’s neighbors.

5) Predictive Capability: In this project, they implemented several statistical methods in order to produce meaningful and interesting results from a dataset.

6) Piazza Word Clouds: For this project, students had to analyze which words and phrases were most salient on their Piazza site, week by week.

One student team, called the Brogrammers, created a schedule planning website where students are able to see which courses are available in each department at the University.  The theme of the website is Super Smash Bros, which provides a fun and interesting way to create a class schedule. Check it out here.

Another team, called The Beard Lovers, utilized the Creature Trainer to create a game that applies utility maximization, discount factors, and transaction costs. They created 2 characters in the game as well as a number of attack moves that each character can use. Ethan Hong, a member of the team, stated that he really enjoyed working on the project as well as EECS 183, and he plans on declaring computer science as his major in the future.

Vince Filary, a student whose team created a Arduino micro arcade machine, also stated that because of EECS 183 he will go on to become a computer science major.

A number of companies were also at the showcase including Amplifinity, Duo Security, Google, Grand River, Mango Languages, Qualcomm, Results at Hand Software, and Yelp. This gave students the opportunity to discuss internships and jobs for the future.