Tom Murphy

Contra Costa College Intel Student Code for Good Virtual Hackathon '13

Contra Costa College Intel Code for Good Virtual Hackathon 2013

We are approaching another wonderful hackathon in 3 weeks. This one is named the "Virtual Hackathon". It is virtual in the sense that we will not all be in 1 building, but in separate houses working on different things. We will communicate to the other houses through the interwebs when necessary. Some of us members [including me] will be offering our houses for 3 days, from May 24 to May 26.

Parallel Programming is easier than separating 2 corks

I've known Prof. Tom Murphy for a few years now. Whenever we were at a conference or other event together and had dinner, he invariably would ask the wait staff if they had two corks he could have. If the place served wine, it wasn't too difficult to find two corks that were the same size or close.

Parallel Educational Appliance: Once upon a Mattress

Submitted by wolfmurphy on

LittleFeConvergence of good ideas into a coalesced one is normative for this millennia. It has has happened with PDA, camera, phone, and portable game system becoming today's smartphone; which is now converging with touchscreen notepad and keyboard into a next ubiquitous device. This blog post highlights convergence of hardware, software and curricula into a lowcost parallel educational appliance, almost free, with a next generation coming out this summer, ready to be wheeled into an undergraduate CS classroom.

Got Hardware? Exploring barriers and breakers to teaching parallelism

SIGCSE 11 seemed like a good place to challenge some of the assumptions that we make all year round.  Assumptions, and dare I say, excuses, for why the integration of parallelism into undergraduate classrooms seems to be progressing so slowly.  When we develop and decide what programs to fund, Intel wants to know what sort of impact we're making to the ecosystem and we naturally are looking for the pain points.

It's a Snap to find the Scratch to BYOB in class

Submitted by wolfmurphy on

Sure I knew my friend Dan Garcia has been working to re-establish the joy and beauty of computer science to a whole new generation.

And yeah, talking with enthusiastic Dan convinced inspired me to develop a parallel class at my college.

Little did I know that the language to which he was gravitating was going to be so doggone fun and appropriate.

Viral Education

Submitted by wolfmurphy on

A new goal for my educational efforts coalesced today: fostering viral education.

I've known for awhile that I could sometimes infect a student; get them working on a problem/project/idea, where they spend lots of time outside of class on this effort. It hadn't occurred to me till today that this notion could be generalized to one student infecting another student.

The culprit catalyst has a two word title: Project Euler.

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