Mini Med School 2013

UW Medicine has a great program called Mini Med School. It's a series of lectures and demonstrations covering various topics in medical practice and research. I spoke on March 12 in the "Living in an artificial world" session. Look for us on UW TV:

Living in an Artificial World – Promising, Innovative and Cost-Effective New Devices – Daniel & Rombokas, Part 3
Mon, 7/29 @ 3:00pm
Tue, 7/30 @ 8:00am
Thu, 8/1 @ 5:00am
Thu, 8/1 @ 7:00pm
Sat, 8/3 @ 7:00am

CS4HS: Computer Science For High School

I had the opportunity to teach a summer workshop at the University of Washington cs4hs. I worked with some high school teachers on the basics of using scribbler robots with the IPRE lancet fluke control board.

Connexions: An Online Library Resource

I was one of the undergraduate summer interns involved in the launch of Connexions, an online content distribution system oriented toward customizable digital textbooks. Although there is now a big push toward putting college course material online, e.g. Coursera, CNX was one of the first real online systems to allow experts to generate useful and reusable chunks of information, and remix them together to build customized courses or virtual textbooks.

A few years later, while TAing in graduate school, I translated the labs used in an introductory Electrical Engineering course into the CNX format. The labs were based on previous labs used in the course and were expanded and improved to be more clear, take advantage of links and the CNX format, and to include more “real” signals. The following is a brief writeup of the labs and what I added:

Lab 0
This lab provides an introduction to MATLAB, including creating and displaying simple time series signals. The lab demonstrates the ease with which MATLAB handles complex numbers, and provides an opportunity for the students to see what sound data looks like and how that matches with what they hear.

Lab 1
In Lab 1 the students learn about scripts and simple functions in MATLAB. They create a function which they will use throughout the labs, adding a little complexity in each. They are also exposed to John Conway’s famous “game of life” simulation.

Lab 2
The content mirrors what is being taught in the class, including convolution. In this lab the students use their custom function to create a more complex signal and are introduced to the concept of harmonics.

Lab 3
The final lab deals with Fourier series and the results of using subsets of Fourier coefficients. It incorporates issues with the real sound data used in the first lab with what the students have learned from the subsequent labs, and guides them through the process of playing and interpreting the signals they have learned to create.