A Winning Semester Ends 2020 with a High Score

UAT students have been busy competing all semester!

Even though competitions were mostly virtual in 2020, that didn’t slow down the students in their quest for knowledge and experience. From cyber warfare to data science challenges, competition has been fierce and UAT students have gotten plenty of hands-on practice.

It’s very important for STEM students to test their ingenuity in the real world. They must learn how to think, analyze information, and apply their knowledge to create solutions. UAT professors provide these opportunities through various contests… some for extra credit, and some for street cred that also looks pretty dang good on a resume.

Here are results of some of UAT’s most recent events.

National Cyber League Competition

In November, UAT cyber students participated in the National Cyber League Competition and made it into the gold bracket for the Team Game!

UAT students also placed in the top 60 in the nation for web hacking. Plus, for the WR-CC-DC practice round, the team ended up getting into the top three. Congrats Cyber Students!

4-in-1 Contest

Dr. Jill Coddington held a Virtual 4-in-1 Contest that ended with over 30 entries! The four subjects included Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Advancing Computer Science (ACS), and Dr. Coddington was very happy with the results.

“What an amazing turnout of projects! The innovation, variety, and quality of projects made me proud—UAT has some amazing and motivated students,” Dr. Coddington remarked.

The overall winner of Most Innovative was Sandibell Vega with her bilingual sibling Chatbot – Chatbot, who interacts with kids in a fun and very positive way.

See the project at https://youtu.be/mTgvmnTbIho.

The first place for Mobile was Edwin Kys for Shatbot Sora, a chatbot goddess who is sarcastic, flippant, and knowledgeable in Astronomy.

https://youtu.be/82JVij-3zbc

Second place went to Michael Hinsberg for Mobile App Email Helper. It features speech to text with appropriate grammar (for example: their vs there, to, too, 2 – it chooses the appropriate one). Also, the app does number translation from speech to words and words to number values, which is helpful for those who need to write checks as well.

https://youtu.be/_cqp8zq17Hc

Third place went to Joe Parisa for Every Show Joe, a web scraper that finds all the local shows. It includes interactive maps with distance sliders to determine how far the user wants to go. Once the user finds a band they might be interested in, it finds songs so by the band so they can sample the music before going to an event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR9SH-Fygoo&feature=youtu.be

The AI first place winner was Alejandro Salas with an Einstein Chatbot that shares information about his life, scientific achievements, and philosophical thoughts.

Second place in AI was Joe Parisa with Reginald, a Chatbot who is the guru of Warhammer. Although quite sarcastic, Reginald shares his knowledge of the game and back story with anyone interested. This is very helpful for noobs to the game.

Third place was Katherine Lennon for her Chatbot GLaDOS, the antagonist in Portal 1.

Finally, for GUI/Programming, first place was awarded to Bradley Chavis for “What to do Today,” a GUI-based to-do list featuring a professional grade UI and intuitive UX with a good mix of functionality.

Second place went to Dawson Greely for his Linux Security Toolkit. It features tools to track and find vulnerabilities along with real-time graphing of network traffic, both upload and downloads, plus alerts for maximums.

Third place was awarded to Daniel Mitchell for Matching Game. This game has difficulty settings and scoring and challenges the player’s memory.

UAT Creative Competition

Professor Mark Smith’s held a new UAT Creative Competition for branding a general contracting organization. Students were given creative control to do whatever they determined best for the design and company name. According to Dr. Smith, “We had some amazing creations, but the client ended up falling in love with Aubrey Dahl's Renovision idea. Aubrey’s an extremely gifted student that I have had the pleasure of watching develop into a team lead and top-notch student.”

Renovision

Paper Jam

Professor Derric Clark, Game Studies Chair, held a 24-hour Game Jam that was different than the usual. UAT's Paper Jam had students create paper-based games such as board games, card games, pen and paper, etc.

Winners were…

Best Art – Don't Eat The Cat from Rhiannon Holloway and Amanda Grose

Best Use of Theme – Witch’s Brew from William Bailey

Founder's Game Jam 2020

This game jam kicked off the start of the Fall semester and celebrated the founding of the University. It ran from September 18-27 and the theme was CRUSH. The jam was designed for those who have never made a game before, as only teams that had first-time game jammers were eligible for awards.

Best Art, Best Use of Pixel Art, and Best Use of Audio Winner: Team Steamy Steamroller, made up of Kevin Albregard, Joey Chilton, Cory Boyd, Marissa Williams, El McQuade, and Connor Bish.

Download the game at https://borogoigames.itch.io/steamy-steamroller-crush-or-crush.

Most Technically Innovative: Team Bumble Marbles, made up of Raul Montes, Alec Carter, Jake Fusco, Kaulana Lee, Lyndsey Boggs, Darin Palermo, and Morgan Kitay.

Download the game at https://raumonte.itch.io/bumble-marbles.

Best Use of Theme: Crush by Jonathon Sherwood.

Download the game at https://jonathonsherwood.itch.io/crush.

A bunch of virtual high-fives all around to every student competitor! UAT is proud of the extra effort and time these students took to work even beyond their classroom requirements, getting the most they could out of their education.