Making a portfolio has been a very difficult task for me for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, I have programmed in a lot of different areas and in different development environments which all lend themselves differently to be hosted in a web page portfolio format.
Secondly, the Summer of 2019 I left my very cozy position of running the App Development Specialist High Skills Major (SHSM) Program at the Halton DIstrict School Board.
I left suddenly when the Board refused to give me a leave of absence to help get the Six Nations Polytechnic's STEAM Academy get off the ground.
Leaving so suddenly left me in a position of not being able to collect some of my most polished work which remained on my school computer as I would have liked. Even worse, the process to transfer my Google Drive terminated mid-process leaving me with scattered remnants of empty and incomplete folders everywhere.
There is probably a lesson about why a cloud-based IDE is inherently better than device-based ones.
Long story short: Some projects I will just talk about, others I will refer to by image or screen shot. Others I will refer by REPL.
I chose this environment because it allowed me to take some of the sting of regular Java. With wonderful access to libraries and the ability to focus on graphics and games. I have used this environment for years, some of the highlights have been physics simulations and a wonderful multiplayer game I call FlappyBrawl which is similar to the original game Joust and FlappyBird.
I was incredibly pleased to find I could take some of my old work in Processing and get it to work online in Replit.com. Below is a video demonstrating a math game I made as an examplar for my grade 11 students.
I chose this environment because it helps students to understand the structure inherent in Object Oriented Programming.
Tower Defense Game, Finch Invaders, Ant Colonies
Programming in basic Java console can be a tedious and boring way to learn programming. I was exposed at a PD to an agent arena based in Java programmed by Sam Scott , currently at Mohawk College. It was just what I wanted to give a context for abstract classes, but was too easy to "cheese". I reprogrammed it to make it more challenging and enjoyable. I later made another version that allows students to compete in teams of 4 with healers, "tanks", damage dealers and a support character. Very enjoyable. BattleBots
I really enjoyed the over two years I spent programming in Swift. There is something to be said for programming in an environment where the hardware, the OS and the language offer such an intergrated system. I have deep regrets that I cannot really program in this environment now as I do not currently (or foreseeably) teach the language. SOLTA Cosmic Ray Detector, Fundy Fossil Finder, HDSB Mentor, Finger Shaker App
In my professional teaching practice, I adopted "Genius Fridays", where I gave Fridays to have students work on projects they were interested in that were not directly associated to the content being taught. Many chose Unity as their topic of choice. Thus to be able to support them, I learned Unity and have made a number of games in the IDE including a VR Racing Game, Mini Golf, and a TableTopSoccer game. I have also a particle simulation I made a number of years ago to demonstrate the motion of charged particles in electric and magnetic fields.
When I decided to work on making a Cayuga NMT model, I needed someplace to store the sentences online. I chose Tatoeba.org because it was free, established and already had a huge amount ofg sentences for other languages. What it does not have is an easy way to pull out the sentences and link them for the 20 million sentece pairs. I made an app in C# with a nice winform interface and was very please with how fast it was. Essential if you want to make a Klingon to German tranlation model.
Sentence Selector Utility for Taetoba.org, Quasar
I have been interested in Machine Learning and Neural Networks ever since I discovered that the Group Renormalization algorithm I worked on as an undergraduate research project was similar to the basis of the libraries used today.
Picture Bias Demonstrator, Language ML Translator
I was attracted to this environment early on. I saw an example on the repl.it page as a featured example. The documentation leaves a bit to be desired but I love the promise of this library in repl.it. It allows me to take my students and allow them to be storytellers on a platform that is technology agnostic.
VR Longhouse Experience, Cayuga Language Trainer, Physics Motion Explorer
I have been playing around with using Fast Fourier Transforms to make audio streams of teachers and students speaking the language more visible to allow learners to get visual feedback.
Out of that and a weird sense of humor: the Corona Virus Public Safety Announcement came. You can play other music but I thought it would be kind of funny if the Corona Virus actually was apologizing for all the pain they have caused us over the year or so.