Emma with her intern presentation poster.

Emma Meersman (Garfield ’12) was a Microsoft intern the summer after her junior year.  She had taken Exploring Computer Science and worked on 3 Xbox-related projects at Microsoft Research.

Here’s how she describes her project:
“The Xbox Kinect currently does not make full use of its speech interface. To change this, the Microsoft Speech Team is conducting user studies to gain a wide variety of voice samples that help to improve the speech recognition algorithms. Also, by recognizing common speech patterns when applied to a constant situation, we can begin to designate groups of certain phrases to be used in popular Kinect Games. Likewise, we are also working with a driving simulator to measure the ability of drivers to concentrate in unexpected situations when given alerts as they interact with people and technology.”

Alisa with her poster at the intern presentation event.

Alisa, Garfield ’11, worked on a system to translate TED talks from Chinese to English in the Speech Research group at Microsoft Research the summer after her senior year.  She had just completed AP Computer Science.

Here’s how Alisa describes her project which she worked on with two other interns:

“Our main project this summer was building machine translation systems and experimenting with different data pre-processing methods and parameters to optimize translation quality. The results from our experiments will be used in our team’s submission to the IWSLT2011 (an annual international spoken language translation contest).
We also spent time recording English sentences to expand our group’s speech/transcript/translation parallel data collection.”

Grant Bronsdon with a Windows Phone 7 and the poster he made for the intern presentation.

Grant Bronsdon (Garfield ’12) spent the summer after his junior year as a Microsoft Research intern.  He worked on TouchDevelop, a system for creating Windows Phone 7 programs directly on the phone.  Grant had the opportunity to record a video introducing the system.  Grant took Creative Computing his sophomore year and APCS++ his junior year.

Here’s how Grant described his intern project:
“Programming languages as we think of them today are designed for the computer, to be typed out on a keyboard. TouchDevelop is a new programming application designed for Windows Phone where you can program directly on your touch screen. The language and environment is built around it, and my project was to create games for the application, some of which shipped with version 2.0, and to conduct user studies to determine how to improve the application.”

Jenny with her poster at the intern presentations.

Jenny Lin (Garfield ’12) worked on a system for converting English task descriptions into PowerShell commands at Microsoft Research the summer after her junior year.  She had taken AP CS as a sophomore.

Read more about the Microsoft internship program and apply!

Here’s how Jenny described her project:
“I am working with natural language processing. The first part of my project dealt with writing English queries and using logic to translate them into corresponding PowerShell script, so that a computer could effectively execute the script and give the user a desired outcome. The ultimate goal is to find correlation and alignment between the English and PowerShell pairs so that English queries can be “translated” into PowerShell script. I wrote programs in Visual Studio to extract text from answered forum posts.

Next, I wrote code using existing language models and classifiers, along with some feature engineering, so that the classifier could distinguish between English and PowerShell script and extract the PowerShell script from the thousands of forum texts I had gathered.”

NOTE: some will be too big to fit on your screen, some only work on certain browsers and others may crash! Launch at your own risk. Try clicking in the window if there is no response to your clicks or key presses.

Garfield Bus Viewer

Lucas

Displays real-time bus arrivals and departures for stops around Garfield.

video | launch

Slimeball

Max

One or two player volleyball game.

video | launch

Wake Up Call Game

Nikki and Angela

Control the mouse and catch all the cocoons with your pellets.

video | launch

Game of Go

Michael

An abstract strategy board game for two players.

video | launch

NEJ Game

Nicky, Evan and Joel

Turn-based fighting game inspired by Fire Emblem. Be sure to read the help screens!

video | launch

Helicopter Game

Raisah and Elise

Control the helicopter and avoid the obstacles.

video | launch

Nonogram

Summer and Sean

Grid logic puzzle. Get each row and column to have the right number of filled squares.

video | launch

Bomberman Game

David

Bomb the other players.

video | launch

See more project videos…

If you don’t see your project here but would like it to be up, please e-mail Ms. Martin.

Interesting twists might include a timer, items to avoid, obstacles, etc.

See an example here.

Bagels is a variant of the game Mastermind where the computer thinks of a random number and the user tries to guess it.  Each digit of the random number is a value from 1 through 9.  No 0 digits are included, but the same digit might appear more than once.  The player is told how many digits the number has.

Below is a sample log of execution (user input is underlined).

I'm thinking of a 4 digit number. Each digit is between 1 and 9.
Try to guess my number, and I'll say "fermi" for each digit you get right,
and "pica" for each correct digit in the wrong place. 
Your guess? 1234
bagels 
Your guess? 5678
fermi fermi pica 
Your guess? 5566
fermi 
Your guess? 8877
fermi pica pica 
Your guess? 5587
fermi pica pica 
Your guess? 5778
fermi fermi pica pica 
Your guess? 7578
You got it right in 7 guesses!

You may assume that the user will always type a valid guess with the right number of digits from 1-9. In this game, the clues are based on digits that match between the correct answer and the guess. For each digit in the guess that exactly matches the corresponding digit in the answer, the program outputs ”fermi”.  For each digit in the guess that appears in the answer but at a different index, the program outputs “pica”.  If the guess does not contain any digits that appear in the correct answer (no “fermi” or “pica” matches), the output is “bagels”.

It is helpful to think of the correct answer and the guess as lists of digits.  Suppose the correct answer is 7578 and the user guesses 5587 (the fifth guess in the log above).  The above guess has one “fermi” match: the digit 5 at index 1.  It also has two “pica” matches: the digit 8 at index 2 of the guess matches the 8 at index 3 of the correct answer; and the digit 4 at index 3 of the guess matches the 4 at index 0 of the correct answer.

Notice that the digit 5 at index 0 of the guess is neither a fermi match nor a pica match; there is a digit 5 in the correct answer, but it is already claimed by its fermi match with index 1. index  0 1 2 3 correct answer 7 5 2 8 guess 5 5 8 7 The computer’s clue consists of the word “fermi” once for each fermi match (correct digit at correct index), followed by the word “pica” match for each pica match (correct digit, wrong index).  All of the fermi clues are reported first so as not to give any extra information to the player.  The clue for the above guess would be “fermi pica pica”.

You should use lists to store the computer’s random number and the user’s guesses as appropriate, as shown in the diagrams.  This will be a useful way to represent the numbers so that you can compare them one digit at a time.  You can pull digits off of an int by repeatedly dividing and modding (%) the number by 10.

The most difficult part of the assignment is comparing the user’s guess to the correct answer and providing the correct clue.  You will likely want to use a “two phase” algorithm that compares the two arrays of digits in two passes:

• The first pass looks for “fermi” matches, where a digit in the guess is correct and in the correct place.
• The second pass looks for “pica” matches, where a digit in the guess exists in the answer, but at a different index.

The same digit cannot be used for two different matches.  For example, using the correct answer of 7578 and the guess of 5587 from the previous page, the digit 5 at index 0 of the guess doesn’t match anything, because the digit 5 in the guess is already claimed as part of a fermi match.  To implement this functionality correctly, you should find  a way to mark individual digits as being “used” so that they will not be used again in another match.

One way to “mark” a digit would be to change its value.  But you should be careful not to damage the original list for the correct answer, so you may want to make a copy of it or implement some way to restore its state later.  Note, if list a exists, b = a[:] will store a copy of it in variable b. Careful — b = a does not do what you want!  Another way to ”mark” digits would be to keep a separate temporary array of marking values.

The programs should prompt the user for a question then answer it with a randomly selected phrase from a fixed list of responses.

The Python program should be text-based and keep prompting the user until a certain phrase (“quit”, for example) is typed in.

The Scratch program should include some sort of animation to, for example, show the ball shaking. Here is an example of what the screen might look like:

I can’t wait to see your projects.

There’s a folder in which to turn things in at S:\hmmartin\Writeable\APCS(++) Projects — access it through My Computer; the S drive should be called something like student data.  Please create a folder for your group.  If you’re using Eclipse, please copy the entire project folder (use CTRL+C and CTRL+V to make your life easy!).  Please also include your video or just e-mail me a link to YouTube.

I’m hoping several of you will take care of this on the long period.  It’s fine if you want to do it Friday but I’d like to have some time for us to just be together.  If you’re really in need of more time, you can give me things over the weekend or on Monday.

Hope you’re doing great.