All Projects Content

Our aim: 

We offer workshops that provide opportunities to middle and high school students to:

·              learn computer science in fun, exciting, relevant ways and

·              develop self-images as computer scientists.

​We approach STEM education and access to high quality, relevant learning opportunities as a social justice issue of our time, this includes taking an anti-deficit ideological stance on students and their achievement. We start with student identified relevant themes, questions, challenges, and goals and see who students are and what they bring to the table as assets, important and rich resources to draw on. We utilize aspects of the nationally recognized Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum to spark student excitement about computing and focus on bringing the culture into the fabric of computing practice. We utilize a custom-made digital platform called MazeStar that allows students to explore their ideas while learning about human-computer interaction, web design, privacy, coding, debugging, and more. A component of MazeStar is a game-like programming environment called Mazzy in which students learn the building blocks of coding.

 

 
Empowering Research Objectives

Introduction

We present an approach for automated evaluation and generation of videogames made with PuzzleScript, a description-based scripting language for authoring games, which was created by game designer Stephen Lavelle. We have developed a system that automatically discovers solutions for a multitude of videogames that each possess different game mechanics, rules, level designs, and win conditions. This was achieved by developing a set of general ruleset heuristics to assess the playability of a game based on its game mechanics. From the results of our approach, we showcase that a description-based language enables the development of general methods for automatically evaluating games authored with it. Additionally, we illustrate how an evolutionary approach can be used together with these methods to to automatically design alternate or novel game mechanics for authored games.

Related Publications

Chong-U Lim and D. Fox Harrell. (2014) "An Approach to General Videogame Evaluation and Automatic Generation using a Description Language", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), Dortmund, Germany, 2014. 8 pp.

GitHub Repository

This repository provides Artificial Intelligence extensions to Stephen Lavelle's Puzzlescript, an open-source HTML5 Puzzle Game Engine available at http://www.puzzlescript.net

Chameleonia: Days of Lost Selves is a prototype sketch of a game based on shifting identities where the construction of self is at stake. Players make gestures associated with traits such as aggression, commerce, ideology, and more. Player's avatars, and their opponents', then transform in response. One moment the player character is a bazooka-toting cowgirl/boy sipping a softdrink - at the next moment a gold chain and pocketwatch wearing tycoon with stock charts bursting from its top-hatted head.

A griot is a revered storyteller in many parts of the African Diaspora. "The Griot Sings Haibun,"is an improvised performance of music, poetry, image, and computation. Live musicians fuel collective improvisation with Harell's GRIOT, a cybernetic system on which a human "plays" an ever-changing polypoem, an interactive multimedia polymorphic narrative poem. The core of GRIOT is the novel Alloy algorithm to generate new concepts and metaphors by blending, based on recent research in cognitive linguistics, computer science, and semiotics. A polypoem is not the output of a single GRIOT execution, but the space of possible poems and/or the code that makes them. In this work, GRIOT generates (neo)haibun: combined narrative prose and haiku-like poetry of everyday experience, influenced by Basho, and the traditions of beat poetry and African call-and-response; tonight our collective griot sings qualia, the qualitative feel of this human life world.