The Great Escape is an online international multiplayer coding contest being held for 2 weeks from February 6th starting at 12:00 pm EST to February 20th at 5:00 pm EST.

The Great Escape will be a thrilling multiplayer Artificial Intelligence Battle, where students will have to:

• Program the best bot to escape a maze by trapping their ennemies,
• Have their bot fight against other players’ bots in an arena
• Improve their program as they go along until victory!

Participation is 100% online and free. Over 20 coding languages to choose from. International automated rankings + Leaderboard by University. 10+ sponsoring companies offering jobs and internships. Prizes to win: GoPro 4, iPad Mini, and 25+ t-shirts! All skill levels are encouraged to play: no need to be an A.I. Expert to have fun.

UMBC hackers have been participating in hackathons for a year. Their latest victory was in Michigan. Michael Bishoff and Sekar Kulandaivel won third place at MHacks, a competitive 1000 student hackathon at the University of Michigan.

Bishoff says, “We are proud to be representing UMBC at all of the hackathons that we attend and we are definitely giving our school a good reputation in the tech community.”

Kulandaivel and Bishoff created a haptic feedback suit that makes virtual reality more immersive. To do this, they created 12 vibrating modules that are placed on the user’s arms, legs, chest, and head. When various events occur in the virtual environment, the user will feel a vibration in the appropriate location on their body. For example, when a user falls in a virtual environment, they can feel a vibration in their legs, or when a user gets hit in their arm, they can feel a vibration on their appropriate arm.

Kulandaivel and Bishoff won a summer trip to Seoul, South Korea to represent UMBC at the Global Hackathon. The Global Hackathon is a 2000 person hackathon that is backed by the mayor of Seoul. The hackathon’s goal is to increase innovation and produce projects that make a global impact. Attendees of the event will include students from around the world.

Michele Williams, human-centered computing PhD candidate, unveiled the Smart Scarf, at at the Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction at Stanford University and MIT’s Technology Review picked up
on it. Williams had the opportunity to work on the scarf as part of her internship with Microsoft Research.

The current prototype—which the researchers made after consulting with people with autism and hearing and visual disabilities—is a flexible laser-cut garment made of hexagons of industrial felt overlaid with conductive copper taffeta. Some of the modules can heat up, while others can vibrate.

All the modules are controlled by one master module that is also responsible for communicating with the smartphone app over Bluetooth. The modules link together with metal snaps and are interchangeable; if you want a heat-producing module closer to your stomach and a vibrating one on your neck, you can unsnap the chain and reconfigure it, says Asta Roseway, a principal research designer at Microsoft Research and a paper coauthor.

Joan Shin, Education Professor of Practice, has received additional recognition for her book series Our World with National Geographic Learning. The series is designed to give learners the skills and knowledge they need to learn English and understand the world around them.

Our World: Level 4, has been chosen as the Best Entry for Learners in the HRH Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Awards, part of the English-Speaking Union (ESU). The award series was founded in the 1970s to acknowledge innovation and achievement in the field of English language teaching. Winners are selected for originality and substance by a panel of widely respected judges.

Our World uses images, text, and video and provides National Geographic content to young learners of English. The series also provides support and professional development resources for English language teachers. For more information, click here.

Last year, Shin’s book Teaching Young Learners English (National Geographic Learning/Cengage Learning, 2013) received the 2013 Ben Warren International House Trust Prize, which is a prestigious award given annually to the author or authors of the most outstanding work in the field of language teacher education. Shin coauthored the book with JoAnn Crandall, Professor Emerita and former Director of the Language, Literacy and Culture Ph.D. program.

For the official ESU award announcement, click here. To read more about Shin’s work in UMBC Magazine, click here.