projects
Testfrenzy is a website that offers free practice exams and other study material for high school standardized tests, including the AP, SAT, PSAT, ACT, and FBLA exams. The site has been running for four years, with its traffic growing over 50% annually. As of 2011, the site receives 100,000 unique visits per year.
orDare is a project that automates the generation of truth or dare questions. A database contains a large databank of questions and statistical information about them. The application analyzes how users react to the truth or dare questions and adapts new questions to suit their interests.
Music Hero is a Guitar Hero style game that combines entertainment with practicing real music. With Music Hero, you can practice any instrument - piano, guitar, woodwind, brass, string, and voice - on any song you own. Music Hero displays notes that stream across your computer screen. As you play the notes on your instrument, it records your playing in real-time using a microphone, and it keeps score based off your timing and pitch accuracy. In addition to over 100 included songs, you can play along with midi, mp3, wav, aiff, or au songs you have on your computer or find online. You can take any song you need to practice and turn it into a game - warmup exercises, major or minor scales, solos, or your favorite melodies. You can even speed up or slow down the tempo so you can master difficult passages. Plus, in case improvement and sounding better aren't enough, Music Hero gives anyone another reason to want to practice music!
Seam Carving is method of content-aware image resizing. The web application can load images from your computer, and it is deployed using Java Web Start and JNLP. The image resizing is performed in two steps: applying a Laplacian kernel to the image to gauge each pixel's importance, and dynamic programming to find a horizontal or vertical seam or expansion with minimal total energy.
Mine Sweeper is a naval implementation of the classic game, done with original graphics and explosions! Originally designed to be an applet, the final product is a downloadable game that is played in the browser.
JUnity is an interpretive language with units built-in! For example, it can tell you that 1 joule / 5 mph = 0.447 kg * m/s. This was a homework assignment for my second computer science class where we learned about parsing. I added the ability to define variables and functions, as well as write, save, and run scripts. In fact, the GUI I wrote for it is probably more fully-functional than IDLE.
Mandelbrot Magic is a collection of Mandelbrot Set animations, pictures, and desktop background generated by a simple Python script. The full-resolution movie is available here. A Mandelbrot Set is simply a fractal generated from a surprisingly simple formula in the complex plane. One of the reasons the Mandelbrot Set is so interesting is that it's infinite - you can zoom in forever! While no programming experience is necessary to enjoy the artwork, the Python script is posted if you want to make your own. Additionally, VPython was used to render an image I entered in the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009, judged by Dr. Mandelbrot himself! This was based off a project in my introductory computer science class.
TextClouds was my final project in my introductory CS class. It makes a simple text cloud of the contents of a web page.