teaching machines

SIGCSE 2017: Towards Computational Making with Madeup

I’m presenting Madeup at SIGCSE 2017 in Seattle, and I offer below the manuscript of my talk. Introduction Madeup is a tool I began building in 2013 in order to study and teach the algorithms of everyday objects. It’s a language for making things up—things that live in 3D space, things that I could print […]

Button

Two days before the semester started, I had one of those first-day-of-teaching nightmares. Sure enough, my wardrobe malfunctioned. This dream was probably inspired by my real pair of pants that had lost a button. When I told my wife about the dream, she offered to fix the pants. I told her the button was on […]

Crate

There’s something magical about wooden crates. Here’s a little program that recreates that magic on a small scale by subtracting away some triangular prisms from each face of a cube: I printed the model in wood filament, and I can almost see a miniature dock worker sitting on it and eating his lunch: A miniature […]

Speed Coding in Madeup: D6 Edition

I have n ideas in my head of things I want to make in Madeup, and they are starting to fight with each other for my attention. I think it’s time to send some of them packing. Here’s one of them: a speed coding of the obligatory six-sided die.

Madeup Goes To Summer School

My mornings last week were spent with the young folks attending the summer school session at the Chippewa Valley Montessori School. My sidekicks were our little 3D printer and Madeup, the programming language I’ve been working on to code up 3D models. I don’t have a lot of experience working with this age group, and […]

Madeup Status Report #8

Last week I submitted my grades and breathed a big sigh of relief. I love summers. It’s time to work on Madeup! My students and I did make considerable progress during the school year. I mentioned many things in the last status report and we’ve accomplished the following since then: Added a solid wireframe mode. […]

Biosketch

Last week I gave a talk at a local coffee shop on my programming language for generating 3D models. Since I’m teaching a couple of game development courses this semester, I offered some extra credit to students who attended. For proof of attendance, students had to submit a selfie, a receipt, a soiled napkin, or […]

Ask a Scientist Talk

This is the manuscript of a talk I gave at the Acoustic Cafe on April 20, 2016, as part of UWEC’s Ask a Scientist speaker series. Thanks, Paul Thomas, for the opportunity to share my work! Introduction Hi, I’m Chris. I teach machines. I also teach people to teach machines. I like both of these […]

Madeup Lock Core

I worked on creating the core to a lock that looks similar to a lock like this: I started by creating the outline of the face of the lock, then extruded that face. Then I created a cylinder around a portion of the core and found the difference of the two in order to get […]

Madeup Snippets: Ball Wireframe, 3D symbol, and Hourglass

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