The Last Mile is doing some great work. While it looks like we started first (shameless plug) we applaud their work. Great things are happening around the country in isolated pockets. Teaching inmates to code just makes sense and many people are realizing that.
Check out the first article. It is a great piece on why we do the work we do.
Last Mile Information
We built a skeeball table!!
This class project had the Green Building/Construction class assemble and paint the table while the CSE class setup the sensors and programmed the software.
The control box is a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen and detects ball drops using IR sensors on the GPIO pins. QT/C++ was used to write the control app.
What do you get when you take a football fan and teach them to code? A football website.
For those of you who are up on this stuff, HTML/CSS/Photoshop were used to build the graphics and do layout, JQuery was used to make things more interactive (e.g. transitions), and PHP/MySQL was used to create the members area.
What kind of doors open up to someone who can literally create their own web product? I can think of a few very rich guys who started with just that.
We are excited that we are now a member of the C++ Institute Authorized Academy Program. This will allow our inmate students the option of gaining industry recognized professional certification in C++ to compliment the training they are already receiving.
Mrs. Peet received a much deserved award on April 30th for her work teaching in prisons education. She consistently goes the extra mile to give her students the same opportunities and quality of education that students outside prisons take for granted. We are excited to congratulate her for her accomplishments.
A great article that illustrates the type of work that is being done in prison education across the state. Mr. Lee has a reputation for high expectations and facilitating a great learning environment where life changing skills can be learned and practiced.
http://kiroradio.com/874/2754686/Prisoners-at-WAs-Clallum-Bay-learn-the-art-of-French-pastry-making
Students work hard on their projects. I love to show off their work almost as much as they do. Here are some good examples of what students in the Mobile and Game Development program are creating.
Anonymous student id’s have been assigned to protect student privacy and are used unless otherwise noted.
This utilizes a relational data driven UI. It shows that the student was able to design the database for the NFL team schedule and use appropriate windows forms controls to present and manipulate that data. This project was created with C# and Windows Forms.
Some nice shots by a students work. These are levels being designed for a game.
This is a UI for the player select screen of a multiplayer paintball shooter. There is much more to this particular project which includes multi player network capabilities and good old fashioned FPS style action. I am sure we will have a movie of it in the near future.
We are careful to limit the level of violence in games we create so we avoid actual bullets and blood. The principles of detecting collisions and writing code calculate the path of a projectile don’t change much between bullets, paint balls, or arrows. All this code was written by the student using C# and the Unity3D engine.
A model that this student has been working on in Maya which is slotted for use in one of the games being worked on.
This student is writing an app that will let me as the instructor broadcast my screen to the class during lecture. This is easier than trying to read text on a projector from across the room.
This is written in QT/C++ and uses multicast capabilities to send a video of the screen. In addition, the student is writing his own custom video codec to compress and stream the data.
This is the result of a student working through one of the projects in a text book. The student is learning about animation techniques, input control, and tracking game state of multiple objects.
We see here a student learning to create fur in 3D. Clothing, hair and fur are particularly difficult to get correct.
In addition, you see a movie animation of the solar system created in either Maya or Blender (I forget which).
Written By: Ray Pulsipher
We use Linux quite a bit. Mono is a great tool if your app is built to run on it. Installing it is easy enough (yum install mod_mono, a2enable mod_mono, etc..) but you have to take 2 additional steps to enable it on each website before it actually works.
As an admin user in ISPConfig, go to the site and the “Options” tab. In the Apache Directives paste in the following code (replace website.com with the name of your site).
MonoAutoApplication enabled MonoDocumentRootDir "/var/www/website.com/web/" MonoServerPath example "/usr/bin/mod-mono-server4" MonoApplications website "/:/var/www/website.com/web/" Alias /mono "/var/www/website.com/web/" <Directory /var/www/website.com/web/> SetHandler mono MonoSetServerAlias website AddHandler mod_mono .aspx .ascx .asax .ashx .config .cs .asmx </Directory>
After that, make sure to change the ownership of the web folder to www-data (or whatever username your apache web service is running under) .
chown -R www-data /var/www/website.com/web
Once you turn this on, throw an ASPX page in the folder and try it out.
If you have a problem you can look for errors here:
tail /var/log/apache2/error.log
Be aware that turning this on will mess with other scripts specifically PHP.
Written by: Ray Pulsipher
Article about indie game development covers much more than just us, but we get a good showing.
How Humans Took Back the Video Game
Written By: Ray Pulsipher