Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2006
It's clear to many of us that the joker who came up with "education is a life-long experience" never had to go to summer school. The usual reasons given for attending summer school range from a love of learning (puhleeeeze) to too much fun during spring break (sound familiar?). Okay, the class I'm signed up for this summer is "Abnormal Psychology" and no, it has nothing to do with my career-development goals.
Still, not all students have been hanging out at the beach or twiddling their thumbs waiting for PlayStation 3. A goodly number have already signed up to participate in Google's Summer of Code 2006 (code.google.com/soc/), a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open-source programs or to help established projects. This year, Google again will be working with open-source, free-software, and technology-related groups. The ultimate goal is to inspire young developers and give students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer. Last year, Google signed up 400 students and hopes to have even more this year.
Although they probably don't need to go to summer school (but I bet they do anyway), a team of computer science students at Russia's Saratov State University deserves congratulations for capturing first place in this year's ACM Collegiate Programming Contest (icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/). Competing this year were more than 80 teams from universities around the world. Other top teams include Russia's Altai State Technical University, the the Netherlands' University of Twente, Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, and Poland's Warsaw University. MIT came in 7th, the University of Waterloo 9th, and my alma mater (drum roll please) the University of Alberta came in 11th. The first-place prize was a $10,000 scholarship for each team member and computer equipment from IBM (the main sponsor of the event).
Students participating in a programming contest at the University of Texas at Austin may not have walked away with as much loot, but might have had more fun. Game Court 2006 was hosted by the university's Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program and the Electronic Game Developers Society (www.sts.utexas.edu/projects/GameCourt2006). The competition encouraged students to design nonviolent and nonsexist games. Jeff Linwood took first place in both the Commercially Viable and Socially Constructive categories. For those students really interested in game development, both the nearby Austin Community College and the University of Louisiana, Lafayette are hosting GameCamp! 2006 (www.gamecamp.org) this summer.
I'm willing to bet that students at Stanford University, Carnegie-Mellon University, and elsewhere are already hard at work this summer, what with the announcement of the upcoming third DARPA Grand Challenge competition in November (www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/). Recall that in last year's Grand Challenge, the Stanford team walked away—okay, drove away—with a cool $2 million when "Stanley," the Cardinal's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, beat out the competition in a 132-mile race across the Mojave Desert. Second and third place (and $500,000 and $250,000, respectively) went to Carnegie-Mellon University's Sandstorm and Highlander vehicles.
Unlike last year's race, however, this year's Urban Challenge requires autonomous ground vehicles to execute simulated military supply missions in a 60-mile, mock-urban area in less than six hours. To succeed, vehicles must autonomously obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles.
Big deal. It seems to me that the real challenge will be to complete the 60-mile course on less than $60 of gas, and then find a parking place. Good luck.
In the meantime, I will be hitting the books this summer, although I'm rethinking that Abnormal Psychology thing. As luck would have it, David McDivitt, a Social Studies teacher at Oak Hill High School (www.ohusc.k12.in.us/high_school_page.htm), has been using a historical simulation game from Muzzy Lane Software (www.muzzylane.com), to teach the political and economic causes of World War II. Actually, he has two groups of students—one that uses the video game, and the other that uses standard textbooks. And as it turns out, the game players scored much better when tested over a common set of questions.
On second thought, forget it. With my luck, I'd probably be assigned to the textbook control group anyway.
Jonathan Erickson
Editor-in-Chief
jerickson@ddj.com