We had a great variety of presentations again this time! From a robot with omni wheels to a Python NLP library to data visualizations. :)
Leah presented her in-progress Dropbox client for the Haiku operating system.
Riley explained why he put awesome Omni wheels on his robot for FTC robotics club. The wheels have cylindrical bearings around the edge, so they have forward traction but slide sideways to allow motion in any direction in a plane. He's currently trying to understand sine and cosine to convert joystick commands to motor speeds.
Steve presented his TextBlob -- a natural language processing api for python, designed for humans. It wraps the exisitng major Python libraries (like NLTK) in a much easier (but equally powerful) API.
Chris talked about his experiences as the coach for Riley's robotics team. He talked about the challenges, such as not trying to tell them the answer, and the fun of seeing the kids learn programming themselves.
There will be a robotics scrimmage at Memorial High School Jan 4 and the state tournament at UW Milwaukee Feb 1. BadgerBOTS.org organizes & supports robotics teams for ages 8-18. He's interested in trying to help hook up teams of kids with mentors; contact him at [email protected]
Brian does research on how university students learn programming. He presented a tool for visualizing the history of a student's project. He demonstrated that you can see how a seemingly implausible final outcome stemmed from a student's initial architecture choices.
Brian presented his visualizer for brew package dependencies. It lets you see which packages depend on which other dependencies, revealing things like redundant dependencies (where one package depends on another both directly and indirectly) and which packages are the "hardest working" (are depended on by the most other packages).
Colin presented his webapp for finding headphones based on specific attributes. He combined data from multiple forums with links to amazon and a web interface. He's currently working on improving the filtering options in web interface and considering data visualizations.