Continued from Results from the January 2012 Core Skills Course, by Gregory Brown
For our integration exercise we had students build multi-user email based applications. All ten students who completed the course worked on this exercise, and we ended up with everything from an email-based wiki to a system for sharing funny stories and jokes.
For our academic exercise, we asked students to make use of Markov Chains to do something interested. Seven of our students participated in this exercise, and we ended up all sorts of cool results, including a jazz chart generator and a tool which predicts movements in currency exchange rates.
For our modeling exercise, we challenged students to come up with a game strategy helper. While only three students chose to work on this project, we still ended up with some neat tools for helping folks play Gomoku, Risk, and Poker better.
In addition to working on these exercises, through our community service requirement students made contributions to rstat.us, Rubinius, Mission of Mercy, University Web, PuzzleNode, Mendibot and the Ruby documentation project.
If all that wasn't enough, each student also worked on creating their own free software projects. Here's a list of what everyone built during the course:
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Florent Guilleux implemented a Watts-Strogatz model network generator which are used to investigate the "small world" phenomenon.
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Vinicius Horewicz built a SMS abstraction layer which makes working with multiple SMS providers or changing providers very easy.
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Brent Vatne built a mini Sinatra app which integrates todo list functionality with Google Calendar.
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Pablo Torres Navarrete built an AI bot which uses Bayesian classification to learn how to play grid-based games such as checkers.
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Brian Glusman built a Ripper-based customizable tool for detecting code smells.
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Jingjing Duan built a gem dependency analyzer which can be used to identify the most used gems.
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Marcin Pietraszek started work on a barcode reading gem. This tool still has some kinks that need to be worked out, but a good amount of the foundational work has been completed and it is capable of reading EAN13 barcodes under ideal circumstances.
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Rafa de Castro built a simple drum machine. It can also play loops and can be used via irb.
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Sherin Cleetus built a maze generation tool which can render both ASCII and PNG based images.
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Adriano Bacha built a tool for tracking TV series schedules, using Wikipedia as the source data.
When you keep in mind that our courses are only 21 days long, and that our students are intermediate Ruby programmers, it's amazing to see what they've been able to accomplish together. I am constantly overwhelmed by just how awesome these courses turn out.
a tool which predicts movements in currency exchange rates links to: https://github.com/Florent2/Jazz-chart-generator
It's ok?