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Summer Computer Camps | some padding stuff and words needed |
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| Register your child for this summer camp using one of these 3 options: |
University of San Diego
Department of Mathematics
Summer Computing Camps
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego CA 92110.
Students attending USD's Animation and Robotics Computer Camp will create 3D
animations and control a robot through learning the basics of computer programming.The components of the camp complement each other: you will learn how to give instructions to a computer in a logical/sequential order from the animation component, and you will learn about the importance of proper design, planning, and teamwork from the robotics component. Together these skills will prepare you to write your own programs at home or school, to take more advanced classes in computer programming for the success in their schoolwork and their future career.
At the end of the week, you'll be able to write your own programs at home or school, and you'll be ready to take more advanced classes in computer programming where you will learn to do even more.
Alice is a free 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation
for telling a story or creating an interactive game. It was developed at Carnegie
Mellon that runs on Windows and Mac computers. It has a simple interactive interface
that lets students write programs by dragging and dropping graphic blocks to create
or change the logic of the program. These blocks perform the same operations that
commands do in professional object oriented languages like C++, Java, or Python.
Programmers can define variables, use loops to repeat operations, create functions,
respond to input from a mouse and more. Visit
Alice for more info.
LEGO MINDSTORMS is a programmable robotics construction set that gives you the power
to create and command your own robots. You program these robots on your computer
using drag-and-drop blocks, and then upload this program to the robot’s “brain” and
watch it change the logic of the program.These programming blocks perform the same operations that commands do in professional object oriented languages like C++, Java, or Python. This is an excellent educational tool -- programming a robot provides new learners with valuable immediate physical feedback on their programming choices.
| The primary audience for this workshop is composed of young people who are new
programmers. The goal of this course is to provide a foundation in computer science
by letting the students work on programs that interest them. By participating in
this workshop, students will improve their ability to think logically and express
their ideas precisely. They will also learn that programming can be fun and that
they have the ability to become computer scientists or software engineers. While learning to program using Alice, students will develop an understanding of many of the essential principles of computer programing including how to | 
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This course is taught in the classroom and computer laboratory, employing lectures
and demonstrations, in-class exercises, student participation, individual
explorations, and class activities leading to a final project. Every day, students
will be introduced to new computer science topics through structured exercises in
Alice and in LEGO robot programming that reinforce the new ideas.During the mornings of these five full-day sessions, we will teach you to bring your favorite story to life by building a virtual world with a fun 3D programming environment called Alice. Alice was developed to help people learn to program a computer while being creative. You will learn the basics of Alice by creating programs that use sound, pictures, and animation to tell a short story or make a simple game. Then you will create your own one-of-a-kind animation project.
In the afternoons, you will work in teams while learning to build and program a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot to move both efficiently and accurately in response to environmental stimuli. On the final day of camp, your robots will compete with each other in the Robot Showdown!
Dr Hoffoss has been teaching both mathematics and computer science courses to eager students from middle school through university since 1993, when she was a graduate student at UCSB. Since her PhD in 1997, she has taught at Colorado College, Rice University, and teaches now as a tenured professor at University of San Diego. USD is a great fit for her interests and talents because of its strong commitment to high quality teaching, and she has received many teaching awards from both faculty and students.Hoffoss was a Summer Faculty Fellow at NASA JPL, where she worked on computing problems involving optimizing the scheduling of communication between the Mars rovers, Mars orbiters, and the 3 Deep Space Network communication stations on Earth, and also at Bell Communications Research, where she helped develop a new object oriented, deductive database computer language called LAURE.
Since 2011 she has taught several summer computing camps for middle school kids, and enjoys introducing young minds to the excitement of creative problem solving, logical thinking and computer programming using the instant feedback of computer animation and LEGO robot control.
