Education Showcase

Renewable Hearing - Liv Anne Heaton

I am building a hearing aid that can run on solar charged batteries, powered by Raspberry Pi Pico and Circuitpython. It features a fast Fourier transform that is required for altering the volume for different frequencies. What has worked so far is the Fourier algorithm and calculating the decibels from the input. An accessible user interface is still required, and the hardest part is definitely the signal processing from the audio in to the audio out. Live or pre-recorded is fine!

Making an isometric 3D game from scratch in python's Pygame - Samuel Price

I have made a game with isometric 3D from the 2D graphics engine pygame in python. This game uses a series of menus to decided the parameters for a simulation of a basic ecosystem with noise generated terrain. This game is fully operational, as are a few other of my isometric 3D demos. In addition, I also created a small program to help me to draw the 3D models. Come to this talk to learn about the how and why!

Tweet Aware, using AI to deconstruct your Twitter timeline - Bella Ryan

Tweet Aware' is my year 12 major project for software design development. I built a python program that reconstructs a users feed using the Twitter API and then performs sentiment analysis on it. It is a really cool project that went through a few phases of this would be super cool! - but doesn't quite work, damn. In my presentation I will show my design process for the overall project as well as my tinkering with the API to get a result I am happy with.

Python metaprogramming through bytecode -Jonte Deakin

This talk is about my project bytecodemacro. It is a python library which allows for easy metaprogramming through making use of a human readable version of python bytecode which can be manipulated to very cool effects! Here is a link to the Github: https://github.com/Glubs9/bytecodemacro

This worked really well and it enabled me to do lots of cool things!

The hardest part of this project was the intentional lack of documentation around bytecode. The python developers intentionally leave the documentation sparse so it was quite hard to understand! The other issue I had is that python code objects (python functions fall under this) are immutable, which is an issue because if you want to make a recursive function you need to give the immutable object a reference to itself! This was solved by emulating pointer behaviour by using python lists which are stored by reference in the code object, thus getting around the immutability.

Deblurring with Deep Learning - Manindra de Mel

Deep learning has several complex and interesting mathematics underlying it. I will be exploring my journey utilising Deep learning to deblur images. Furthermore, I will discuss the problems I overcame to create a working image de-blurring program. Specifically overcoming problems such as, understanding and implementing the mathematics, choosing the most optimal training method and the hardest problem being fixing the several logical errors found within the program. Included in the presentation will also be a demo of the program de-blurring an imagine live.

Kookaberry apps for learning - Amelia McLaren, Dalia Hamade, Vianne Stavliotis, Elizabeth Park

Given some Kookaberries and some input and output devices we were challenged to create embedded device apps that assist the user in the pursuit of learning or leisure. Some of us decided to code something to help with studying for school, while others coded something aimed towards learning musical instruments. Some of the apps for musicians include a metronome or song practice counter. Meanwhile apps that would help with school studies included a timetable, pop quiz, study timer along with flashcards and a motivational quote displayer. Overall, each app that we created was effective and reached our aim.

The majority of our original ideas for our apps ended up being a success as we put lots of time into brainstorming reasonable and useful embedded systems. Because of this, we were all able to spend more time on the actual code for these ideas. Something that worked well for us was being able to use python. Python was useful for example because it let us simplify our code so that it didn’t look bulky and overwhelming. We had also been learning about python for the rest of the semester, so it gave us a chance to try and apply our theory to an actual project.

There were a few tricky parts in making our projects, but we overcame them with the help of our teacher and our other classmates.The hardest parts for the majority of people were bugs in the code, for example, it was difficult to locate the code sometimes and try to fix it without changing the parts of the code that did work. Sometimes the code would be in the wrong place and other times we could not figure out how to code something by ourselves. This makes sense considering that we are all new to python this year. Specific examples include, not being able to switch from different display interfaces without messing up the other code, recognising simple errors and mistakes, and problem solving difficult parts of the code.

With all the obstacles that we faced, we all overcame them by working hard and asking for help. Our teacher Ms Noble assisted us with our code, she helped us compact our code so that it didn’t look chunky and also helped when we couldn’t figure out what was wrong after looking over the code many times. She also provided a cheat sheet for us on how to use Python with the Kookaberry. This cheat sheet helped us a lot since we had to include a bit more coding for the kookaberry part. We also asked each other when we were stuck on a particular code and worked together to form resolutions."

Amanda J Hogan She/her

Amanda is a teacher at a co-educational secondary school in Sydney. She's been trying to find really effective and engaging ways to teach students how to solve problems with code for some time now with mixed success. She is a contributor, content creator and tutor for the Sydney branch of the Girls Programming Network. She is the current treasurer of the ICT Educators professional association in NSW and in that role tries hard to mentor new teachers or teachers new to computing. She always has some project on the go from e-textiles to making web tools to make her life easier. In a former life she was a database and web developer. In her opinion Python is the best mix of power and ease of use for beginner programmers. In her spare time she throws herself at bouldering walls or rides her bike.

Nicky Ringland she/her

Nicky is joining from the Gadigal Lands of the Eora Nation.

Dr Nicky Ringland is a Product Manager at Google, working on Open Source Software tools. She is passionate about advocating for the user and driving consensus while solving gnarly problems.

A recovering academic with a background in Computational Linguistics, Nicky completed her PhD at the University of Sydney. (Her thesis involved thinking hard about the names of things, then training a computer to do the thinking for her.) She went on to co-founded Grok Learning, an edtech startup teaching hundreds of thousands of students to solve problems with code, and the Girls' Programming Network Australia, which runs free workshops introducing coding and computer science to school students across Australia. Named one of Australia's “Superstars of STEM” and 2018 AFR Women of Influence, Nicky is passionate about teaching the next generation the skills they need to become the creators of tomorrow.