The UNK artificial intelligence class, taught by Dr. John Hastings, held the 7th annual robotics competition on April 29, 2009. This year, the students designed, programmed and built basketball-playing robots, which had to make three point shots. Students used VEX robots, with added pieces of cardboard, metal, etc. The two teams also competed regionally at the Midwest Computing Symposium (MICS) 2009 held in Rapid City, SD. Media coverage of the local competition was provided by NTV and the Kearney Hub. The Hub coverage is available at: Robot Article
Iky, the robot developed by Anne Hillebrand, Jacob Mason and Casey Glatter received third place at the MICS competition, while Tiny, the robot developed by Edward Wang, Anatole Mirasano, and Joseph Ostrander won the local competition. Congratulations to all the robot competition winners!
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Brett Chloupek, a 2005 CIS-Geography alum shown below, was invited back on campus this April to give the keynote address at the UNK Student Research Day. While at UNK, Brett participated in the Summer Student Research Program, Student Research Day, and served as Student Body President and Regent. He and three fellow computer science students were awarded the 2005 Peter Kiewit Student Entrepreneurial Award from the Nebraska Board of Regents for their work on the UNK Carillon Bell Tower. Brett is currently a Foreign Language/Area Studies Fellow and Fulbright Finalist working on a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Kansas. It was great to have Brett back on campus. |
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For the spring 2009 semester, the CSIS Department was host to Anne Hillebrand, a computer science exchange student from the Roosevelt Academy in Middleburg, Netherlands. Anne (shown below) participated in the UNK Student Research Day (SRD), the UNK robotics competition and the Midwest Instructional Computing Symposium robotics competition. Her SRD poster was on the simplex method for solving linear problems. While at UNK, Anne took programming languages, artificial intelligence, computer security, differential equations, and heat and thermodynamics. Anne was a welcome addition to our program for the semester and we wish her the best of luck as she returns to the Netherlands |
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On January 19, 2009, CSIS faculty and students assisted with the ESU-10 TECHS “Build a Computer” Day. Eleven schools and 64 students participated in the event. In addition to building a computer, students installed the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. During the day, students were introduced to Web 2.0 applications, Jing, Gabcast and ChaCha. The TECHS teams were also introduced to video journalism. The video can be viewed at http://www.studenttechs.org/BACKearney .
During lunch, CSIS faculty met with the ESU 10 staff and the high school teachers to discuss IT careers and the TECHS curriculum. CSIS has a long history of working together with the ESU-10 TECHS program. |
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