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CU: Build your own 3-D video game
Dec 5th
you build a video game, learn to code
In just one hour, school kids, teachers and any code-curious member of the public with an Internet connection can now create their own 3-D video game using a tutorial built by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder in preparation for the global “Hour of Code” event happening the second week of December.
CU-Boulder’s game-building program allows people with zero experience coding to design their own 3-D worlds by “inflating” hand-drawn 2-D icons and then programming those objects to interact in defined ways. For example, a participant could easily create a 3-D version of the classic arcade game Frogger by inflating a frog and then writing a line of code that would tell the program to squash the frog if it collides with a truck that has also been programmed to move horizontally across the screen at a set speed.
CU-Boulder’s online game-building tool is among a variety of self-guided tutorials that have been created for the Hour of Code, an event that aims to recruit 10 million schoolchildren to spend one hour during the week of Dec. 9-15, dubbed Computer Science Education Week, learning the basics of coding. The event, spearheaded by the nonprofit code.org, is designed to spark excitement about coding among youth in order to bolster a future interest in computer science, a field that’s increasingly important to a wide range of careers as well as everyday life.
“Programming should be easy and exciting,” said CU-Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning, who led the project. “But that’s not where we are. The perception of the public is that it’s hard and boring. Our goal is to expose a much larger as well as broader audience to programming by reinventing computer science education in public schools.”
CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code tutorial—which can be found at http://hourofcode.com/ac—builds on two decades of Repenning’s research, which has pioneered drag-and-drop programming tools for kids called AgentSheets and AgentCubes. Repenning and his team also have developed Scalable Game Design, a curriculum teachers can implement to help their students use AgentSheets and AgentCubes to learn computer science through building their own video games.
Students can use the same tools and their new computational thinking skills to build science simulations—the coding needed to lay out what should happen when a truck collides with a frog is not that different from the coding needed to outline the chemical reaction that occurs when two molecules collide, for example.
The Scalable Game Design project recently received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue to expand nationally.
From the beginning, the purpose of Scalable Game Design was to give school kids a taste of coding that might be able to flip the often-held belief that computer programming was not something they wanted to learn.
Repenning and his team began to reach out to kids in the local Boulder Valley School District, offering video game-building workshops as an after-school activity. The participants loved it, but the kids who initially showed up were the usual suspects—boys. In subsequent years, the project was introduced into classes that were already being taught during the school day, exposing all kinds of kids who might not normally be inclined to try computer programming, especially girls and minority students, to code.
“We asked them after, ‘Did you enjoy the activity?’ And they said, ‘Yeah. We love it and we want to do more of it,’ ” Repenning said.
The program is now ubiquitous in Boulder-area middle schools, and beginning about five years ago, Repenning received a $1.5 million grant from NSF to expand the program to schools outside the local district, especially districts with widely varying demographics, from inner-city schools to extremely rural schools and Native American communities. To implement the expansion, CU-Boulder hosted trainings on campus each summer to prepare teachers to deliver the program.
During the first expansion, Repenning and his colleagues also discovered that the way the video-game curriculum was taught impacted the degree to which girls, who are vastly underrepresented in computer science, were interested in coding. Direct instruction appeared to turn girls off, while inquiry-based approaches got the girls as excited as the boys.
Repenning has since received two more NSF grants. The first, for $1.5 million, is being used to follow up on how pedagogy affects girls studying computer science. The second and most recent grant—$2 million awarded in August—recognizes the achievements of the initial expansion effort and is being used to further spread Scalable Game Design across the country.
After the initial expansion, the Scalable Game Design team measured the success of the program by gauging the interest students had in learning more about computer science after they finished designing a video game and by analyzing the games themselves to see if the design of the games demonstrated a grasp of coding concepts. With positive results in both categories, NSF gave the team a green light to further expand the program by offering some teacher-training programs online.
The Hour of Code tutorial built on the Scalable Game Design infrastructure now allows anyone who is interested to get a taste of video game programming. More information on the Hour of Code can be found at http://csedweek.org/. Anyone interested in participating in the Hour of Code or using CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code program in their classes can find information athttp://hourofcode.com/ac.
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$143 Million Athletic Facilities Re-Design Approved By 9-0 Vote
Dec 4th
DENVER – The University of Colorado athletic department on Wednesday took its most significant step forward in two-plus decades, receiving the green light from the school’s Board of Regents to proceed with a comprehensive facilities re-design and upgrade.
The Regents voted 9-0 to approve a $143 million plan presented by Athletic Director Rick George that will:
· Add an indoor multipurpose practice facility (football field/300 meter track), whose location is to be determined. The proposed site is on Franklin Field, just east of Folsom Field’s east side. The indoor facility also would be used for tailgating on game day;
· Refurbish the Dal Ward Athletics Center, which was completed in 1991, to include an Olympic sports strength training room in the sub-basement level and new locker rooms and equipment room on the field level.
· Redesign Dal Ward’s first floor for the expansion of Olympic sports/sports medicine, a leadership development center and an end zone club with club seating and loge boxes;
· Transform the second floor of Dal Ward to increase the athletic department’s academic support system from its current 5,115 square feet to 17,200 square feet. The training table will remain on the second floor;
· Add a 21,900-square foot high-performance sports center on the northeast corner of the stadium, as well as a rooftop terrace on the northeast corner (which will generate revenue by being rentable for non-game-day events), converting the south offices at Folsom Field to retail space. The rooftop terrace is also to be used on non-game-day events.
· Also proposed for the third floor of the sports performance center are team meeting rooms. Coaches’ offices and athletic administration offices will move from their current locations at Folsom Field’s “gates” to the suite level (fourth) on Folsom’s east side.
“I’m very excited about what this will do for our program long-term,” said George, who was named CU’s athletic director on July 18 and started work on Aug. 12. “It will allow us to create a world-class, holistic student-athlete experience. It will allow us to compete for and win championships, and it will allow us to become fiscally responsible. I believe it’s a long-term sustainable model.”
He said the long-range, comprehensive plan obviously was well-received by the Regents: “Getting a 9-0 vote is very rewarding for the whole group that has worked on this.”
By the time ground is broken – hopefully this spring – on the department’s “sustainable excellence initiative,” George hopes to have one-third of the money raised. “It could be corporately, it could be an annual revenue that we generate, it could be private donors.”
Regent Steve Bosley called George’s proposal “a well-thought out business plan” that represents a large and potentially lucrative investment for the campus, city of Boulder and state. Of the possible criticism aimed at launching such a project without a large number of donations in hand, Bosley said, “That dog won’t hunt.” He said he prefers “starting with a vision and turning it into a plan.”
Close to $10 million “in actual gifts and concrete pledges” has been raised thus far, George said. “And in the last two months, we’ve canvassed all areas of the country, from our own backyard to each coast and have ‘asks’ out there in the neighborhood of $40 million more.”
While a $50 million goal initially was stated, with an early December timetable, George said that number “was never one that we had to meet by December. We are enthusiastic, focused and driven on raising the initial funds needed for the plan . . . however, it is not, and never has been, a deal-breaker to have raised the money by the first of December.”
The upgrading of CU’s facilities, said George, goes beyond potentially leveling the playing field in the Pac-12. Rather, “It’s what we should be doing for our student-athletes,” he said. “This is a significant area of need for our student-athletes. We don’t have locker room spaces, we don’t have academic spaces that our student-athletes need to be successful, to have a great experience – and we need to address that.
“We have a strength facility that’s only 10,000 square feet for 300-plus student-athletes, spirit squad, what have you. It’s a need, something we need to have for this program to be successful. Notwithstanding what other schools are doing, what they’re doing is great, but this is what we need at CU to be successful long-term.”
In attending Pac-12 Conference football games over the past several years – CU has been a Pac-12 member since 2011 – Regent Sue Sharkey said she became aware of a facilities upgrades from “seeing cranes all over the place” at football stadiums. “We need to get it done and we need to get it done now,” she said.
In addition to George’s presentation on Wednesday, the Regents heard from football coach Mike MacIntyre; men’s basketball coach Tad Boyle (via video); Kris Livingston, associate athletic director/student success; Miguel Rueda, head athletic trainer. The Regents also watch several video presentations from student-athletes in all sports speaking about their various facility needs.
MacIntyre told the board he was “excited” about the future of the university and CU football, but added, “There’s a ceiling we’ll hit in recruiting if this (the facilities upgrade) if this not done. It’s always either the first or second question I get in recruiting. He also said coaches he recruits against in the Pac-12 Conference have come into Colorado pursing in-state prospects and, because of CU’s current facilities, have questioned the school’s overall commitment to athletics. His first Buffs team finished 4-8 overall, 1-8 in the Pac-12 Conference.
Livingston told the Regents the athletic department’s academic support system’s physical resources have shrunk over the last several years from 8,400 square feet to just over 5,000 square feet. By way of comparison to another Pac-12 member, Oregon’s athletic department academic space is at 40,000 square feet. But Oregon also has nearly twice as many student-athletes as CU’s 340.
Rueda said the high performance sports center would help him and his staff better identify and treat student-athletes before minor injuries become major. The center, he added, “will allow for a program where our student-athletes will receiver world-class and holistic resources dedicated to helping them achieve.”
George said the proposal’s next phase is a presentation to architects. He hopes ground can be broken this spring, with a completion date of the 2015-16 academic-athletic year. The upgrades, he said, will put the Buffs “on par with the best out there” and will “set us up for the long-term and put an end for any Band-Aid type improvements to get us through the short-term. We’ll be set for a long time.
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CU study: Some primates sleep in caves for safety
Dec 4th
The ring-tailed lemurs may be opting to sleep in caves for several reasons, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Associate Professor Michelle Sauther, who led the study. While the cave-sleeping behavior is likely important because it provides safety from potential predators, it also can provide the primates with access to water and nutrients, help to regulate their body temperatures during cold or hot weather and provide refuge from encroaching human activities like deforestation, she said.
“The remarkable thing about our study was that over a six-year period, the same troops of ring-tailed lemurs used the same sleeping caves on a regular, daily basis,” she said. “What we are seeing is a consistent, habitual use of caves as sleeping sites by these primates, a wonderful behavioral adaptation we had not known about before.”
A paper on the subject appeared in the November issue of the journal Madagascar Conservation and Development. Funding for the project came from Primate Conservation Inc., the International Primate Society, the American Society of Primatologists, the National Geographic Society, CU-Boulder, the University of North Dakota, Colorado College and the National Science Foundation.
Although sleeping in caves by ring-tailed lemurs — which are found only in Madagascar — has likely been going on for millennia, it is only now being recognized as a regular behavior, said Sauther. The endangered Fusui langurs, slender, long-tailed Asian monkeys roughly 2 feet tall, also have been documented sleeping in caves but as a direct result of extreme deforestation, moving from cave to cave every few days. There also have been isolated reports of South African baboons sleeping in caves.
Ring-tailed lemurs are easily identified by their characteristic, black and white ringed tails, which can be twice as long as their bodies. They weigh roughly 5 pounds with a head-body length of up to 18 inches and are highly social, congregating in groups of up to 30 individuals. Sporting fox-like snouts and slender frames, they are unusual among lemurs, spending a considerable amount of time on the ground feeding on leaves and fruit and socializing, said Sauther.
In “gallery forests” near rivers, ring-tailed lemurs regularly sleep high in the canopies of tall trees. But in “spiny forests,” most of the trees with woody stems are covered in rows of spines, making them uncomfortable as well as dangerous sleeping sites because predators can easily climb them, Sauther said. The new study documents their cave sleeping behavior in the dry spiny forest habitat adjacent to limestone cliffs.
The lemur observations were made at the 104,000-acre Tsimanampesotse National Park and the Tsinjoriake Protected Area in southwestern Madagascar between 2006 and this year. The research team used field observations and motion-detector camera traps to chart the behavior and movements of 11 different troops of ring-tailed lemurs.
One of the early clues to the cave sleeping by the lemurs was their presence on limestone cliffs adjacent to spiny forest trees or on the ground when Sauther’s research team arrived at the study sites early in the morning. “They seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was not from the trees,” she said. “We were baffled. But when we began arriving at the study sites earlier and earlier in the mornings, we observed them climbing out of the limestone caves.”
The primary predator of the lemurs is a cat-like, carnivorous mammal called a fossa native only to Madagascar that is closely related to the mongoose and may weigh up to 20 pounds. Fossil evidence shows a cougar-sized relative of the fossa that only became extinct several thousand years ago likely preyed on lemurs as well, she said.
There is evidence that some early ancestors of humans in South Africa may have used caves to protect themselves from predators, said Sauther. The remains of hominids going back several million years have been found inside or near limestone caves there, and some fossil bones have evidence of damage consistent with the bite of saber-toothed cats.
“We think cave-sleeping is something ring-tailed lemurs have been doing for a long time,” she said. “The behavior may be characteristic of a deep primate heritage that goes back millions of years.”
Co-authors of the new study included Associate Professor Frank Cuozzo of the University of North Dakota, Ibrahim Antho Youssouf Jacky, Lova Ravelohasindrazana and Jean Ravoavy of the University of Toliara in Madagascar, Krista Fish of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Marni LaFleur of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Fish and LaFleur are former CU-Boulder students of Sauther.
Sauther co-directs the Beza Mahafalay Lemur Biology Project in southwestern Madagascar with Cuozzo, a former CU-Boulder doctoral student. Centered at the roughly 1,500-acre Beza Mahafalay Special Reserve, the research focuses on how climate- and human-induced change affects lemur biology, behavior and survival.
Sauther and her team were aided by field observations made by students and faculty from the University of Toliara in Madagascar. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students from CU-Boulder regularly travel to Madagascar to conduct research under Sauther, including students from CU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which provides hands-on research and fosters student-faculty relationships.
“I never thought I would have a chance as a CU undergraduate to conduct research in an exotic place like Madagascar,” said former UROP student Anthony Massaro, who was part of a team that trapped ring-tailed lemurs, measured their physical characteristics including dentition, and released them back into the wild. “Dr. Sauther and Dr. Cuozzo mentored and guided me through the process of creating and conducting a unique research project.”
Unfortunately, habitat destruction, including deforestation, is increasing in many parts of Madagascar. In southwestern Madagascar, trees are being harvested for cattle forage, construction materials and firewood, and the mining of limestone there — used for the production of cement, fertilizer and other products — is increasing. Ring-tailed lemurs are now listed as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission.
Sauther has been conducting research on Madagascar for 25 years, beginning as a University of Washington graduate student. Today she has several CU-Boulder doctoral students working with her, including James Millette, who is studying how the tooth wear of lemurs relates to their foraging behaviors.
“Madagascar is a challenging place to conduct research,” Millette said. “Part of our job is to work with local communities, because without the support of these people there would be no lemur conservation. We consider Beza, where we have been working with the community for several decades, to be a real success story.”
A video of ring-tailed lemurs climbing into a cave is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjWF3_SmYS0&feature=youtu.be.
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