Reflecting on my activities at CCSC:MW 2019

This past weekend, I attended the annual conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Midwest. I have been involved with this organization for many years, and I wanted to take a moment to share an overview of how I was involved at this conference.

Student Showcase

I am in charge of the Student Showcase. Many years ago, it was a Student Poster Competition, but it felt to me that this format gave inordinate status to the scholarship of discovery. When I took it over, I revised the format to have two tracks inspired by Boyer's Scholarship model: traditional "research" goes into the Discovery track, and interesting applications of computing goes into the Applications track. This year, we had six Applications track presentations and three Discovery track.

There are practically always Ball State students in the Showcase, and so rather than judge the event myself, I organize volunteer judges. The students are told ahead of time that they will be judged on the same six categories recommended by Glassick et al.; specifically, they are told they will be evaluated on the following:

• Clear Goals (“What is the goal of this work? What problem are you solving?”)
• Adequate Preparation (“How did you get ready to do this work?”)
• Appropriate Methods (“How did you solve your problem? Why did you approach the problem in this way?”)
• Significant Results (“What was the result of this work? Who is affected by this work?”)
• Effective Presentation (“How well does this poster or demonstration communicate what is important about this work?”)
• Reflective Critique (“What would you do differently? What does this mean for you and your career?”)

Over the years, I have fiddled with the judging form with varying degrees of success. This year, I asked each judge to rate presenters on a 1-5 scale for each presentation and each category, and there were no hitches. The scale I provided was Poor (1), Below Average (2), Satisfactory (3), Good (4), and Excellent (5). I have also put the actual judging form online, in case anyone would like to see it.

To determine the winners, I simply take the medians across the six categories and sum them. This led to a clear winner in Discovery and Application tracks as well as a clear Honorable Mention (the third highest overall score), so those are the prizes we awarded. I am proud that my own Canning Heroes team presented and won the Applications track award this year.

Tutorial: Unreal Engine 4 for Computer Scientists

Since getting into Unreal Engine 4 a few years ago, I have noticed many interesting manifestations of Computer Science concepts. I decided to run a tutorial session this year at CCSC:MW to show these to the attendees. However, it did not go as well as I had hoped. I did not have machines that could run UE4, nor could I expect attendees to have adequate laptops, so I designed the tutorial as a sort of Show and Tell. Then I was scheduled for 8:30AM on Saturday, which meant that attendees would be tired and very few students would be there. The room we were given was really awkward: it was a lab, which meant everybody was behind monitors where I could not make eye contact. To make it worse, there was no station where I could stand and work at my laptop, so I was seated and, because of HDMI cabling, facing away from the attendees. To top it all off, I was traveling with family, and my son got sick that morning at the hotel, so I was distracted and unfocused.

Suffice it to say, I would not be surprised if the session were poorly reviewed. Heck, I would poorly review it. I would like to do something like this again, but in a more controlled environment. Perhaps I will move forward with writing up an actual paper about some of the interesting manifestations, and then be able to give a shorter show-and-tell in a future year.

On a positive note, preparing for the tutorial gave me several new ideas for video tutorials. In fact, I could take my tutorial outline, chop it up, and have a pretty good series. Now, it's a matter of determining which ideas have sufficient weight to merit the time required to do the video. (For those who don't know, I have a YouTube playlist of game programming tutorial videos. In fact, I have written up this blog post while rendering my latest video in Blender.)

WIP: Mapping Game Design Learning Outcomes to CS2013

I presented in the Works-in-Progress session what I have shared here on my blog about mapping game design learning outcomes to the ACM/IEEE CS Body of Knowledge. I think it was well received. I have made the slides available online for anyone who wishes to see them, but as usual, my slides do not make a lot of sense without the stories to go with them.

I think the audience assembled for the WIP session was happy to hear my story, and they seemed to understand my frustration. I think they appreciated seeing how one becomes more critical of CS2013 as one digs deeper into the recommendations. One mentioned that his institution had given up on CS2013 and simply used instructor consensus. Ball State is really the largest school in the region that regularly participates in CCSC:MW though, and most of the attendees were in very small departments at private liberal arts schools.