Sep
28
2016
There is a transition phase in the first two weeks for every freshman, as a freshman you have just gone from a senior who knew all the ins and outs of their high school to a young-ling freshmen. Walking into a whole new dark cold mystical world called college – more specifically, TTU. Time doesn’t stop for anyone – it is what is happening every day as life goes tick tock. We are almost a month into when I first arrived on campus as a freshman. The only other time I was here was for orientation. Now three weeks later I have become so independent it is a miracle that I would not have ever imagined before.
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Sep
22
2016
I really enjoy playing board games. Not luck based games such as Monopoly or Risk, but games that require a well-executed strategy. My favorite board game is Maharaja. The idea is to move your architect along the cheapest routes to visit cities and to build palaces. The first player to build all seven palaces wins. Finding the cheapest route to a city depends on where you have already placed houses and on where you can build or move houses on your turn. This is a shortest path problem that must
consider all the different house configurations that can be created during the player’s turn, selecting and utilizing the cheapest one. Writing a competent AI for this game appeared a manageable task as it required a Graph data structure with Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. Maharaja became the first board game that I turned into a computer game, complete with networking for multiple human players. It was not uncommon for me to think that there was a bug in the game when I couldn’t figure out the path that the AI used and spent so little money on. After staring at the board awhile, I could always find the roundabout route that the AI found, which I might never have seen as a player. 
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Sep
14
2016
Although I’ve lived for some time I can still experience so many new things living in Cookeville. Starting as a freshman at Tennessee Tech University has only increased the number of new people I’ve met and opportunities I can take apart in. While I had a busy life in high school, I’m amazed at how many different organizations and activities there are on campus. From talking to the representatives of many organizations during Welcome Week to attending informational meetings, I’ve found everyone to be open and welcoming. In fact, I may need to learn to say “no” quickly as it is easy to over commit.
Women of CyberEagles meeting.
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Sep
04
2016
Hi! This is my first ever blog post. I have written articles for newsletters, conferences, and journals, but had never written a blog post until today.
It is hard to believe that I have been teaching in the Department of Computer Science since August of 1993! I am beginning my twenty-fourth academic year of full-time teaching. All my colleagues from that first 1993-1994 school year are no longer working in Bruner Hall, due to retirements or professional moves. When I first started teaching at TTU, I was only about 4 years older than the seniors; now a lot of the freshmen were born in 1998. The new students take for granted a lot of things that are technological advances to me. They have never known life without the World Wide Web or smartphones.
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