Achievement

IGERT faculty Doug DeCarlo taught Computational Modeling, the second of 2 foundational courses for IGERT and other students, including those with little or no prior work in CS. Emphasis was on teamwork and collaboration. Small, interdisciplinary groups created novel projects that emphasized close coordination as much as technical programming expertise. Competition among the groups fostered student interest and enthusiasm. One project focused on computational game theory; each group designed and evaluated strategies to compete against opponent s in a simplified virtual world. The most successful groups worked well together and interleaved design and evaluation. In the second project, groups used layering, shadows, and transparency to demonstrate phenomena in lightness perception (studied by IGERT faculty member M. Singh). The CS students and Psychology students worked together to produce displays that were easy to control and produced the strong perceptual effects.