A great story on the Un-loop.org program and the good work they are doing at WCCW.
They do a good job of showcasing the education opportunities as well as addressing the issues that former inmates face post release.
A second chance: Local program teaches female inmates how to code
Great video done by WA State Department of Corrections to showcase the good work that incarcerated students are doing at Clallam Bay Corrections Center.
A great paper on the current state of technology in corrections by the US Department of education. We get referenced as example 1 on page 12.
https://www.edpubs.gov/document/ed005580p.pdf
On March 7th 2016 we had a Make day. Inmates were invited to come up for a day of coding robots.
Un-loop ( facebook page ) came to Clallam Bay Corrections Center and exposed incarcerated students to programming, robotics, and the culture of software development.
One of the great feats accomplished by David and Lindsey was to get a dozen software development professionals to travel from Seattle to a prison 3.5 hours away in a remote location.
Check out their page for photos and more information.
Here are links to the robots they brought and donated.
We got a nice mention in the Buccaneer again for a past article. Love the support for education.
http://www.passthebuc.com/2016/02/top-six-buccaneer-stories-of-the-decade/
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.
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