Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Wednesday, September 23, Dr. Ursula Wolz gives a talk on two of her research projects: "Does Learning Computer Science Require a Teacher? Reflections on Automated Tutors and Learning Communities."

On Thursday, September 24, our own Samuel Rebelsky gives a short talk: "Scripting GIMP with Racket."

Both talks are in Science-3821 at 4:15 PM, preceded by refreshment in the CS Commons at 4:00.

Ursula Wolz will be teaching at Grinnell as a Noyce Visiting Professor in Spring 2016. Dr. Wolz is currently involved in two projects, one to create a very robust mechanical tutor using a sophisticated rule base, the other to create face-to-face communities of coders that remove, or at least reduce, the technology divide. She will provide a quick overview of both projects, and then invite stimulating discussion of the major technological and ethical issues involved.

Professor Rebelsky's talk is practice for an upcoming presentation at RacketCon in St. Louis. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is an open-source alternative to Photoshop. In the early days of GIMP, the designers added a scripting language, Script-Fu, based on Scheme. Over the years, Script-Fu has been superseded by Python-Fu, although Script-Fu remains an option, albeit with a primitive IDE. Over the past few years, my students and I have built a library that allows programmers to script GIMP using Racket and the DrRacket IDE. In addition to providing the “glue” between GIMP and Racket, we also added a library of routines more amenable to novice programmers. In this talk, we will discuss the design of both the “glue” and the broader library. We will also discuss a related introductory course in CS that uses multiple models of image making as the motivating problem domain.

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

Mediascripting is a project of Grinnell College's Glimmer Labs. In this project, we are building resources to support interactive scripting of media applications.

The student researchers currently working on CSG-CS2 include Alexandra Greenberg, Mark Lewis, Evan Manuella, Jennelle Nystrom, Kimberly Spasaro, and Christine Tran.

Further information is forthcoming.

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

On Thursday, January 24, Hart Russell 2014 and Prashanna Tiwaree 2014 will present the results of their summer 2012 research project:

This project sought to replace the MediaScheme console used in CSC 151 with a more versatile system that consists of DrRacket, a Scheme development environment, communicating with the GIMP through D-Bus, an inter-process communication tool that is found in modern Linux systems.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Re-architecturing MediaScheme, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, November 15, Sarah Henney 2013 and Martha Fletcher 2015 will describe their summer internship work on the MediaScheme project:

Self-Disclosing GIMP(SDGimp) is an ongoing project with the goal of adding self-disclosure functionality tailored to the MediaScheme library into the GIMP. In short, SDGimp will allow a user to perform an action in the GIMP and then view the Scheme expression which can be used to duplicate that action.

In this Extra, we will discuss and demonstrate our work from this summer on SDGimp, including our expansion of the MediaScheme library to include more actions from the GIMP.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Self-disclosing GIMP with MediaScript, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, April 12, Chike Abuah 2014, Rogelio Calderon 2014, and Sydney Ryan 2014 will discuss their work in summer 2011 on media computation using Python:

The Media Computation approach to learning, interactive scripting and design, since being pioneered at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has become increasingly popular in the introductory computer science courses at Grinnell College. To support this approach, we designed the MediaPython architecture, with the help of Professor Sam Rebelsky. MediaPython is the collection of GIMP functions that allow users to issue commands in different Python environments that affect images and make context changes in the GIMP.

In our talk we shall discuss the MediaPython architecture, the universal gimpbus plug-in, and the use of Python as a functional scripting language, accompanied by several exciting demonstrations.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, The MediaPython project, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!