Create Critters. Learn Java. (Help Me Identify the Winning Student)

The UC San Diego undergraduate who created the toughest CSE8B Java critter is name-less. Do you know the winner's name? The needs-to-be-named person speaks at 1 min 40 seconds. Leave the person's name in the comments section of this post, or email me at dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu.

Check out the two minute video that tries to capture the energy and excitement exuding from CSE8B, which Beth Simon taught during the 2009 Winter Quarter. Any other comments on the class? Leave comments!

I shot video on the final lecture, when the students held a tournament in which their "critters" battled each other. To create critters, the students had to understand "inheritance" in the computer science/Java sense of the word. Each student extend the critter class in a unique way, and then the various critters battled.

Materials Science Professor Wins International Award

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Marc A. Meyers won the 2009 Rinehart Award, given at the 9th Congress of the DYMAT Association on the Dynamic Mechanical and Physical Behavior of Materials Subjected to Dynamic Loading, held in Brussels, Belgium, from September 7 to 11.

The 2009 award was given to professor Meyers (UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Materials Science and Engineering) and to Prof. Field (U. Cambridge, UK). Meyers is affiliated with UC San Diego's Materials Science and Engineering program, which is concerned with the structure, properties and applications of materials. This university-wide program aims to provide fundamental knowledge for understanding of materials with the objective of predicting, modifying, and tailoring the properties of materials to yield enhanced material performance.

Meyers was one of the Jacobs School professors recently profiled in an NSF video. Watch the video here. Read the transcript and learn more here.

Three hundred researchers from 29 countries attended the DYMAT congress, which was held at the Royal Military Academy. DYMAT is a European based global association coordinating activities in the domain of dynamic behavior of materials.

The citation in the plaque received by Prof. Meyers reads: For outstanding achievements to the understanding and modeling of the structure/ property and damage behavior of materials subjected to high-strain-rate and shock-wave loading. The award was given at the inaugural session of the meeting, after keynote lectures by Profs. Field and Meyers , by General Major Harry Vindervogel, commander of the Royal Military Academy, and by Dr. Richard Dormeval (CEA-France), president of DYMAT. The DYMAT award, established in 1990, is a global recognition, and past recipients are from the USA (4), Russia (1), Japan (1), Germany (1), and China (1).