An introductory educational board game for use in early computer science education

Early computer science education should be necessary in high school curricula, but often it becomes inextricably linked to the act of programming instead of the study of the principles of computation. In order to divest computer science from programming a new teaching medium is needed, and early research into games as teaching tools shows some positive results when used properly. In order to find a better way to teach early computer science concepts I have designed and implemented a board game which illustrates and defines a few necessary computer science terms and mechanics. I had reasonable success in the classroom, with mixed results from two completely different groups of students. The game seems effective, but my methods of teaching and lesson plan surrounding the game weakened the gains I recorded. I plan on reworking the base rules and developing new expansions which would increase the playability of the game and simplify the methods for delivery of the computer science material covered during a game sessio

Senior Design Capstone: Using an Engineering Design Process to Create a Sawzall Wobble Fixture for Milwaukee Tools

The overall objective of this design project was to successfully design a fixture to expedite the repairs of Sawzalls at the Milwaukee Tools repairs facility in Greenwood, Mississippi. This project was executed in accordance with guidelines set forth by the Senior Capstone Design class at the University of Mississippi as well as the quality engineers sponsoring the project at Milwaukee Tools. The fixture was created utilizing an engineering design process with the goal of allowing technicians to press two Sawzall wobbles onto an angled Sawzall wobble shaft using an arbor press with just one press. By beginning with a straightforward problem statement, a clamping fixture was able to be concepted and prototyped to complete this goal. The final fixture design was presented before faculty and industry members at the conclusion of the semester

The Civil Rights Movement and the Methodist Church in North Carolina

The United Methodist Church and its predecessor denominations have a long and complicated history on the issues of race and civil rights. The denomination has overcome many sectional and social divisions to become a more racially open denomination. One of the biggest periods of change for the denomination was during the Civil Rights Movement. The United Methodist Church, and its direct predecessor the Methodist Church, was swept along by the great social change during the period from 1954 to 1968 to become a desegregated church. In some ways, elements within the church helped to foster that social change. Despite having been deeply divided on the issues of civil rights and race, particular in the South, the denomination offered protection and support for clergy attempting to push for a fairer society, even in southern states such as North Carolina

Probabilistic Analysis of Self-assembly

Probabilistic Analysis of Self-assembl

I\u27m Gonna Stay Right Here Until They Tear This Barrelhouse Down: Black Power and the Origins of Blues Tourism in Greenville, Mississippi

This dissertation connects and comments on the historiography of the black freedom struggle as well as studies of the blues and blues tourism. To blues studies, it recognizes the artists discovered by Worth Long as well as his field research and festival production in the 1970s. It moves away from the social constructions of authenticity and segregation of sound, and it emphasizes black agency. My dissertation also contributes to the historiography of the black freedom struggle by providing a much-needed examination of rural economic and community development in 1970s Mississippi. For studies of blues tourism, it announces a revisionist account of the development of blues tourism in Mississippi, tracing it back to the protests against the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. This dissertation takes the long view to better understand the important efforts of organizers at Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE), a Greenville-headquartered non-profit community action organization founded by several former SNCC leaders in 1967 to empower black communities and take action. MACE established an annual festival tradition that focused on cultural education and the preservation of the musical traditions of African Americans in the Delta. The Delta Blues Festival drew on the agricultural region’s harvest festival traditions and borroelements from earlier, black-organized music festivals, which celebrated the image of black progress and racial uplift. By organizing and staging celebrations, such as the Delta Cotton Maker’s Jubilee and the Delta Blues Festival, African American producers intended to not only fill a perceived cultural void, but also refute racist, stereotypical representations of blacks and replace them with positive images that inspired self-esteem and pride in the black communities in the Delta. MACE intended to regain control of the cultural and political identity of African Americans on stage at the festivals. Not merely black alternatives to white-dominated events, not purely recreational nor wholly radical in nature, they provided a forum for reshaping the image of the blues through black experience

Directed Percolation and the Abstract Tile Assembly Model

Self-assembly is a process by which simple components build complex structures through local interactions. Directed percolation is a statistical physical model for describing competitive spreading processes on lattices. The author describes an algorithm which can transform a tile assembly system in the abstract Tile Assembly Model into a directed percolation problem, and then shows simulations of the aTAM which support this algorithm. The author also investigates two new constructs designed for Erik Winfree\u27s abstract Tile Assembly Model called the NULL tile and temperature 1.5. These constructs aid the translation between self-assembly and directed percolation and may assist self-assembly researchers in designing tilesets in the aTAM with non-deterministic local properties, but guaranteed global properties. Temperature 1.5 results indicate the brittleness of the standard temperature 2 tile assembly system, and the NULL tile is shown to assist simulations of large assembly processes while also reinforcing the need for variable temperature models to more closely simulate laboratory self-assembly

Special Perturbations on the Jetson TX1 and TX2 Computers

Simplified General Perturbations Number 4 (SGP4) has been the traditional algorithm for performing Orbit Determination (OD) onboard orbiting spacecraft. However, the recent rise of high-performance computers with low Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) factors has provided the opportunity to use Special Perturbations (SP), a more accurate algorithm to perform onboard OD. This research evaluates the most efficient way to implement SP on NVIDIA’s Jetson TX series of integrated Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). An initial serial version was implemented on the Jetson TX1 and TX2\u27s Central Processing Units (CPUs). The runtimes of the initial version are the benchmark that the runtimes of the other versions were compared against. A second version of SP was implemented using compiler optimizations to increase the speed of the program. A third version was developed to utilize the Jetsons\u27 256-core GPU for parallel processing to reduce the runtimes of the program. Runtimes of the different versions were then analyzed to determine the most efficient way to implement SP on the Jetson TX series of computers