Splash Biography

Come and learn the fundamentals of electronics! We’ll start with the basics and build up enough knowledge to design some cool circuits. Most of our time will be spent working in small groups to build each of three example circuits. After this class, students will have a basic understanding of analog circuits. In particular, we will be discussing concepts such as voltage, resistance, and current, and using some particular components including switches, resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, LEDs, and breadboards.

Have you ever wanted to build a self-balancing robot, RFID cat door, or homebrew quadcopter? Then you should get an Arduino! Arduino is an "open source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software." It's a lot of fun to use and enables an astounding number of interesting projects and applications. In this course, we'll introduce you to the Arduino platform and walk you through some simple projects. We'll spend our time getting hands-on with Arduinos to design and build a few basic circuits, culminating in the design of an Arduino-based theremin instrument. Join us for a fun time of electronics prototyping, building, and hacking! You'll walk out of this course with the knowledge to begin tackling your very own electronics projects.

Machine learning is a field of computer science related to artificial intelligence. It combines ideas from statistics, optimization, and computer algorithms to learn from data. Machine learning methods have led to the development of email spam filters, search engines, computer vision, and even self-driving cars. This class will introduce you to the very basics of machine learning: problem formulation, model selection, model implementation, and evaluation. We'll discuss some of the underlying theory, while using an application to motivate it and provide intuition. In particular, we will use the methods of machine learning to teach a computer program to determine whether or not a human cell is cancerous. We will train a model from measurements extracted from pictures of both cancerous and non-cancerous cells, then apply the model to new cell measurements to determine if they may be cancerous. The machine learning model that we discuss, called naive Bayes, will rely on probability. We will introduce the probability concepts we need (conditional probability and Bayes's formula), but this class will be easier for those who have had previous exposure to probability. Come join us for an exciting introduction to machine learning, and learn how to teach a computer to recognize cancer cells!

Come and learn the fundamentals of electronics! We'll start with the basics--voltage, current, and resistance--and build up enough knowledge to design cool circuits. Most of our time will be spent getting hands-on and working in small groups to build our circuits on a breadboard. We'll focus on building an intuition for basic electronics concepts and practical applications instead of their mathematical foundations. No previous exposure to electronics is required or expected. This class will cover the pre-requisites for my class on Arduinos.

Have you ever wanted to build a self-balancing robot, RFID cat door, or homebrew quadcopter? Then you should get an Arduino! Arduino is an "open source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software." It's a lot of fun to use and enables an astounding number of interesting projects and applications. In this course, we'll introduce you to the Arduino platform and walk you through some simple projects. We'll spend our time getting hands-on with Arduinos to design and build a few basic circuits, culminating in the design of an Arduino-based theremin instrument. Join us for a fun hour of electronics prototyping, building, and hacking! You'll walk out of this course with the knowledge to begin tackling your very own electronics projects.

Apple, HP, Dell, Gateway, Asus, and all the other computer manufacturers have one thing in common: they make A LOT of money from people believing that computers are hard to build. Spoiler alert: they're not. This class will show you what it takes to build your own desktop computer. Buying components and assembling your own computer enables you to save hundreds of dollars on a basic machine, put together the ultimate gaming rig, or whatever else you want -- the point is that you are empowered to put exactly what you want in your computer. We'll cover what the components of a computer are (motherboard, processor, graphics card, hard drive, case, etc.), how to compare components and pick out what you want, how they all work together, and what resources you have available to you on your journey. Rather than asking your parents for a new computer for the holidays/your birthday, ask for funding on building a computer of your own! Take this class if that sounds like a cool plan, or you just want to learn more about what it would take.

Have you ever wanted to build a self-balancing robot, RFID cat door, or automate your house lights? Then you should get an Arduino! Arduino is an "open source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software." It's super easy to use and enables a whole host of interesting projects and applications. In this course, we'll introduce you to the Arduino platform and walk you through some simple projects, culminating in the design of an electronic instrument. Even if you don't own an Arduino, you'll walk out of this course with the knowledge to begin tackling your very own electronics projects. Join us for a fun hour of electronics breadboarding, prototyping, building, and hacking!