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Hi, I’m Shray. Welcome to my Senior Project Blog. Over the course of the next few months, I will be posting to this blog weekly (if not more often), to chart my progress through my senior project. Here’s a quick rundown of my project.

First, a description: Through my project, I want to educate children and adults with no background in computer science about some basic computer science principles. But rather than just have a presentation and lecturing at the “students,” I’ll be taking a more fun approach by incorporating these computer science ideas into games (especially mazes) and demonstrations that are more familiar to everyone.

I’ll be approaching these tasks in a systematic way, beginning with reading lots of books and articles in order to deeply understand the principles I will teach, including functional programming, object oriented programming, and maze-solving algorithms, as well as contextualizing the speed of a computer.

Once my foundation is solid, I will set about building a simple interface with which I can create, solve, and time mazes. This interface will be necessary for the remainder of my project. The next step will be creating mazes and running solving algorithms in different languages and styles to see which of them take the least amount of time, and which take the greatest.

When I have a complete interface, and am able to use it to solve mazes, I will modify it such that I can print out these mazes (or send it out online) so that I can conduct an experiment where 5th graders at BASIS will solve these mazes. Using this data, I can compare the speed of a computer to the speed of one or many 5th graders.

The final portion of my project will be to compile everything I have learned into a presentation, teaching to children and adults wherever possible. I will then use the concepts taught in this presentation as part of my final presentation at the conclusion of the project.

TL;DR

I’m Shray. This is my Senior Project Blog. On this, I’ll be charting my progress through my project, where I aim to teach children and adults without a computer science background about basic computer science principles. The timeline through which I will be doing this is stated above.