Summer Research

This summer I will be staying at Mudd to do summer research with one of the CS professors at Mudd, Prof. Z Sweedyk. I working with her and about 10 other students on a project which is polishing and testing educational video games for middle school students across the country.

Prof. Z teaches a class here at Mudd in which students for large groups to design and create a educational video game. Schools (and classes) from all around the country suggest a certain type of game or idea that they would like to introduce into their curriculum. The class then works on these projects throughout the semester. At the end of the year, Prof. Z hires a summer staff to polish these games and work with the students to test them.

This semester there are 14 games which have been / are being created. At the start of summer research, we will test the games ourselves and decide which games seem the most promising and what issues need to be addressed. We will also meet with students from some of the schools to have them test the games and gather feedback on what improvements they would like to see. Then, we will break into small groups and work on polishing the games over the course of the summer.

The games are most commonly developed in Python, which is a fairly easy language to pick up and work on. There is also the possibility that we would have some sort of game development workshop for children which we would organize and put on during one week of the summer.

One of the classes which has a game in development is a middle school computer science in Hawaii. There is a chance that if we decide that this is one of the games we want to work on, we may travel to Hawaii to have the game tested by the students there. However, there are also games being developed for schools in California and other mainland states.

It sounds like we will be working from about 10 to 3 everyday, and longer depending on need and how we are feeling about our projects. Prof. Z has also suggested that we will have a number of fun events as a research group including dinners and potentially a concert at some point during the summer.

I am so excited to be working on this project and it will be fun to see what California is like in the summer! I will probably be living on campus with the other research students, which should be a lot of fun. I know it will be a great experience and a nice break from school.