Presented by:
Dan Garcia
Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019, and is a national leader in the "CSforALL" movement, bringing engaging computer science to students normally underrepresented in the field.
Thanks to four National Science Foundation grants, the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" non-majors course he co-developed has been shared with over 800 high school teachers. He is delighted to regularly have more than 50% female enrollment in BJC, with a high mark of 65% in the Spring of 2018, shattering the campus record for an intro computing course, and is among the highest in the nation! He is humbled by the international exposure he and the course have received in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and others media outlets. He is working on the BJC Middle School curriculum.
The International Space Station (ISS) circles the earth many times a day at an altitude of about 250 miles. It continuously streams data down to Mission Control in Houston. The ISS National Laboratory has teamed up with UC Berkeley to build engaging curricular modules that would engage computer science and data science students; the project is called "Student Mission Control" – http://smc.berkeley.edu/. One of the activities we are developing is a "Loss of Acquisition simulator" in Snap! that presents an out-of-control spinning ISS, and needs the student to fill in one block to stop it from spinning pointed "up" (away from the earth) by controlling rotational thrusters at just the right amount and just the right time. What makes it additionally challenging is that there is a finite fuel supply.
- Duration:
- 5 min
- Room:
- Plenary
- Conference:
- Snap!Con 2022
- Type:
- Lightning Talk
This session is a part of:
Jadga Hügle
Our first round of lightning talks! Please look at the list of talks below.