Sarah Waterson

Index:

Research Interests
Current Projects
Completed Projects
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Research Interests:

    My computer science interests are mainly in computer graphics and animation, however I have recently become interested in creating visual teaching aids. Mainly due to the lack of visual aids I've noticed in the classroom, I've begun to look at ways to change that and hopefully create some easy to use tools that would allow computer science educators to incorporate visual aids and animations in their teaching.

    I hope to continue my education in graduate school someday, however I am uncertain yet as to exactly when that may happen and in which field I end up pursuing. Who knows - I've always wanted to be a professional ballroom dancer.

Current Projects:

Social Data Structures

    Along with fellow Europa member Joe Atzberger, initial ponderings and ideas have begun to develop on creating a set of data structures that will be able to commuicate thier current state and state changes to clients. I've dubbed these data structures for the moment social data structures because they will essentially be broadcasting information about themselves constantly. The purpose for creating such structures is part of an investigation into creating a way to animate algorithms and changes in program state without having to create special implementations of the algorithms. We honestly haven't too much of a clue how/if this will work and be useful, but our initial inquires have brought up some interesting software engineering questions, among other things. For more details, take a look at the project web site.

    I'm hoping that this project eventually leads to a senior research thesis, and as such, it will more than likely span my last year here at OSU.

Graphical Sorting Algorithms

    Initially a project done to learn Java and some design concepts, the graphical sorting algorithms project turned up a lot of questions on software engineering and and visualization that I still wish to explore. Our group included Joe Atzberger, Brad Penoff and Tyler Neylon. Together we got a basic application structure built and implemented the animation of a few sorting algorithms. Currently the project is somewhat suspended as we decide which of the hundred possible directions we want to continue moving.

Completed Projects:

Tutorials

    Last year as a memeber of Europa, former co-worker Jen Fox and I assembled tutorials for Emacs, Unix and RESOLVE/C++. These were essentially re-vamps of some older tutorials for the CIS 221 classes. As this project is quite dated, I have not provided a project page. If you have any questions or concerns regarding these tutorials, feel free to email me at waterson@cis.ohio-state.edu.

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