Posts tagged: cgs

Winter is coming!

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A sunny day at the University of Washington Seattle campus, silhouette of George Washington statue. Photo by Katherine B. Turner

Winter is coming to CGS, and with it a few small updates:

Come see us and many other great CSE groups at Computing Open House on Saturday, December 5th to kick off Computer Science Education Week.

Next, we’re pleased to announce Dragon Architect has a new website!

Finally, our time as part of the Verigames family may be coming to a close, but that doesn’t mean the fun has to stop for Paradox  fans. We are pleased to announce you can continue to play Paradox straight from the Center for Game Science website. Paradox (and Flow Jam) wouldn’t have been possible without the dedicated efforts of many people over the years and we want to say thank you for playing along with us.


CGS and Allen Institute Bringing Collaborative Brainpower to Neuroscience

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brain Today, we’re pleased to announce our newest project in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), we are pleased to announce plans to work with a growing community of citizen neuroscientists to develop a game whose ultimate goal is to produce a “periodic table of the neurons.” The effort will use crowd-sourcing to accelerate the discovery of 3-dimentional neuronal structures, while getting students and other non-“expert” citizens who participate excited about discovering some of the mysteries of the human brain. Read the full press release to learn more about the other creative new efforts announced by the White House yesterday to get more students and adults excited about science and space.

Our new project will join our well-established crowdsourcing efforts such as Foldit and Nanocrafter, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to continue our efforts to lend our expertise in the growing realm of citizen science.

Additionally, our Foldit community has some news regarding a special puzzle challenge via the Bardwell Lab at the University of Michigan.


We’re hiring!

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were_hiring_sign-150x150The Center for Game Science has an outstanding opportunity for a Digital Learning Curriculum Specialist. We are seeking a Digital Learning Curriculum Specialist to coordinate and help create a set of modular blended instructional materials for K-12 math from a brand new perspective that marries traditional learning with our interactive technologies.

If this sounds like your area of expertise, we want to chat with you. Apply through the UW Hires site. (We do not accept resumes directly, and are unable to provide you with a status update through our general information email due to the volume of applicants.)


July News from CGS

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cgs-verticalIt has been a busy summer here at the Center for Game Science. Let’s take a look at some of our latest happenings!

First of all, we’re pleased to note that the Seattle Public Library system’s Summer of Learning is going well. All of our BlockStudio and Dragon Architect workshops have been filled, and with healthy waiting lists. If you want to take a peek at a number of the creations being made, head on over to our special Summer Learning page and check out the galleries – we just added Dragon Architect‘s gallery today!

Speaking of the Summer of Learning, did you know that Nanocrafter is also a part of the teen offerings this year? Best of all, the Seattle Public Library is offering all of these resources for free! There’s still some summer left to take advantage of the fun, and we encourage anyone local to the library system to do so.

The new Verigames newsletter is out today, featuring a bunch of community efforts, a spotlight on the new BBC article that came out recently, and a link to the archive of our Paradox chat. To follow all the Paradox news, feel free to join our Twitter and Facebook pages! Made by the same team that worked on Flow Jam, Paradox is a fresh approach to the now familiar problem of software verification, so if that’s your thing, feel free to check it out.

Finally, in Foldit news, we’re gearing up to bring community-driven broadcasting through Twitch in the near future, so we can share the vast range of protein folding knowledge the community has gained over the years with a much larger audience than ever before. Our new effort – dubbed “FolditTV” will be releasing it’s first schedule very soon. Our Marburg efforts are also continuing this summer with new puzzles and discussion, and you can follow along (and join in) via the Foldit site, or our social media outlets.


CGS Hosts Affair to Remember

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On Friday, May 15, the Center for Game Science hosted yet another legendary soirée for members of CSE. Known for the sheer grandness of scale in years past, expectations were high for this year and we are pleased to report the elegance did not disappoint.

This is a picture of one of the bread tables.Many department attendees traded in every day attire for something a bit fancier and milled after hours in the CSE Atrium to live music, enjoying a number of snacks and art on display.

Meticulously masterminded by graduate Yun-En Liu, the event boasted ten different styles of bread, seven charcuterie selections, seven cheeses and bread add-ons, fourteen tempting appetizers, three styles of tea sandwich, four varieties of canapés (with a vegan friendly option), four quickbreads designed to slow the party goer down with indecision, two types of vienoisserie, and four tarts to try.

Delicious chocolates on a plate.The sweet tooth party goer also would not leave disappointed, with an array of seven petit-fours, one delicious looking stollen, eight quickbreads, six varieties of baked goods, six tart types, four cakes, and a staggering forty-four confections. A half dozen artfully mixed beverages were available to attendees over 21. View the full menu courtesy of CSE News.

For those eyeing the task of organizing for next year, we are pleased to mention that a large number of people pitched in to make all these delicious treats possible, and we also want to thank them for those efforts.

Live music being played on a keyboard by a dapper clad gentleman.

A partial list of contributors to this affair to remember:

Artists

  • Marianne Lee
  • Katie Kuksenok
  • Igor Mordatch
  • Yun-En Liu
  • Barbara Krug

Musicians

  • Kira Goldner
  • Christopher Lin
  • Eric Mullen
  • Edward Zhang
  • Robert Duisberg
  • Lilian de Greef
  • Steve Tanimoto
  • Jeffrey Snyder

Our graduating master event planner Yun-En Liu also provided this parting advice to future planners, “My main advice is to figure out what people want to do, then point everyone in the same direction and fire. Bonus points if you know people who are willing to organize things to reduce the mental load on yourself – the planning can consume a lot of resources if you’re not careful.”

Happy graduation to the upcoming graduates of CSE, and we hope everyone in attendance at this little casual party had a great time. You can see an assortment of the party pictures in the Center for Game Science-TGIF album on Facebook, with more being added as we receive them.