Outreach Activities

High-School Summer Internships

This past summer, Brandon Lucia and I hosted an intern from City High, a charter high school in Pittsburgh. The intern learned how to program embedded systems in Python using micro:bit. By the end of the summer, he had built programmable pieces for autonomously tracking statistics (e.g., so character pieces in a game like DnD can track their own hit points).

Women @ SCS

In October 2019, CORGi co-hosted a research project at OurCS with the Abstract research group. OurCS is a 3-day, research-focused workshop that provides opportunities for undergraduate women from the USA and around the globe to work on exploratory problems and learn about life in graduate school. OurCS is run by Women@SCS.

Participants in our workshop experienced computer systems research by dealing with real challenges posed in cutting-edge systems and using some of the tools that researchers develop to overcome these challenges. We taught the students how to program energy-harvesting embedded systems, using tools and frameworks developed in the Abstract group. By the end of the workshop, our group had implemented a electronic tic-tac-toe board, where a smart game piece localized its position on the game board using on-board motion and color sensors.