Welcome!
My name is Alexis Chuck; this journal documents my experience working on Looking Glass with Caitlin Kelleher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri during the summer of 2011.
Looking Glass is a programming environment that helps children (around the age of middle school) learn computer programming by letting them create animated (and possibly interactive) movies. The hope is that its creative storytelling potential will be a way to attract demographic groups who might otherwise believe programming is "not their thing." This summer, the REU students in the lab are working on developing an online community to add another level of social interaction and support to Looking Glass. We are also working on integrating supportive aspects of the community into the IDE. My project is designing and developing a system for making inspiring elements from the community accessible to the user from within the IDE. These elements are things like shared characters, challenges, worlds, and text prompts. See this page for more information.
I am ordinarily a Computer Science major at Pomona College in Claremont, California where I am a senior expecting to graduate in May 2012.
Sadly, I will not be able to update this website once it is posted to the DREU website in late August of 2011. I hope I've found all the spelling mistakes and I apologize for any broken links!