• April 2, 2018
    Computer with a key diference
    Faculty-student team creates system for people with physical disabilities
    student uses fist to type without a keyboardWhen you walk into any coffee shop, college library or office, you see fingers flying across computer keyboards. But what if you don't have fingers, or can't use the ones you have? How do you communicate? How do you fit in? That's the issue Central Michigan University computer science faculty member Tony Morelli and graduate assistant Taylor Ripke, of McBain, Michigan, are tackling. They're refining a computer system that has a projected image in place of a keyboard and a monitor that doubles as a camera.

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  • April 30, 2017
    Student sparks enthusiasm for video game development on campus
    Starting her freshman year at Central Michigan University, Molly Rossman knew she was interested in video game design. The Midland senior grew up playing Nintendo 64 games such as Super Smash Bros and Pokémon Stadium with her father. The artist went to college in 2013, striving to break into the industry with her drawings and designs. There is no video game design program at CMU, so Rossman developed her own path. Her ambition drove her to work with advisers and faculty to personalize her curriculum. In her freshman year, she collaborated with Tony Morelli, a computer science professor, to establish the Game Development and Design Club that teaches other interested students how to make games.

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  • January 9, 2017
    University professors design educational hybrid video/board game using HP Sprout
    HP announced its user-friendly Sprout 3D Capture Stage scanner back in 2015, and the Sprout Pro was released about a year ago. While HP was busy unveiling the Sprout Pro G2 at CES 2017 this week, two creative and thoughtful educators from Central M​ichigan University have been busy using the platform to reinvent how ecological management is taught in the classroom, by designing an innovative hybrid video/board game. The two-player game, called Rangers vs. Planners, teaches students the value of effective eco-planning.

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  • October 26, 2016
    In search of the great hack
    CMU alumni from GM host company's first university hackathon
    More than 20 Central Michigan University students carrying game remotes, drones, robots and handcrafted 3-D printers gathered with a few CMU alumni from General Motors​ for the automotive company's first university hackathon. ​ A hackathon is a...

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  • April 27, 2016
    Gaming from Atari to Xbox
    CMU students learn about video games in 40-hour gaming marathon
    On a recent weekend, Central Michigan University gamers geeked out to a span of 40 years of video games they played over the course of 40 consecutive hours. The gaming marathon started with a game from 1977 named Combat, and at around 8 a.m. the next morning as students – surrounded by empty cans of Mountain Dew and pizza boxes – were in the early 1990s playing Super Mario World. Surrounded by monitors broadcasting the games in an active learning classroom, students learned about video game design through the years as they played all of their favorite childhood games.

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  • November 13, 2015
    Virtual reality to help the visually impaired regain vision
    The words "virtual reality" traditionally bring images of large science fiction helmets and scenes from The Matrix. However, CMU Assistant Professor of Compute Science Anthony Morelli is finding other ways to put the technology to use helping those with disabilities.

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  • August 4, 2015
    Amazon web services research grant awarded to Patrick Seeling
    Amazon, Inc. awarded Assistant Professor Dr. Patrick Seeling with the Department of Computer Science at Central Michigan University an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Research Grant.

    Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon, Inc. The award allows for $3900 in credits to Amazon’s cloud computer server environment at multiple locations worldwide.

    For multiple years, Dr. Seeling and Troy Johnson, who is currently finishing his MS in Computer Science, investigated the characteristics of the world wide web and how browsers on desktop or mobile devices access web pages and their contents. Their research led to several publications, including one in the third ranked publication in telecommunications (based on ISI Impact factor 2014): T. A. Johnson and P. Seeling, "Desktop and Mobile Web Page Comparison: Characteristics, Trends, and Implications,” IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 52, iss. 9, pp. 144-151, 2014.

    Access to the AWS cloud will allow Dr. Seeling and Troy Johnson to investigate how today’s mobile devices access the world wide web and where performance is wasted because servers are non-optimal configured and content is downloaded too often, wasting network capacities and cellular plan data caps next to the limited energy found in mobile devices.
  • April 20, 2015
    Virtual to reality video games to help teach disabled children cognitive skills
    Video games could change the lives of children with intellectual disabilities as students and professors work together to create a safer way to teach kids functional skills like crossing the street.

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