From: Kelvin Sung

Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 7:01 PM

To: 'John Nordlinger'

Cc: 'Ivan Lumala'; Kelvin Sung

Subject: Award Number: 15871 - May-June 2007 Progress Report (XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

Re:       Award Number: 15871: May-June 2007 Progress Report

(XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

This report covers our activities over May and June 2007. We missed submitting the report for May because of the unexpected traveling and the associated preparation for MSRA Games and Graphics Workshop in Beijing. Here are our accomplishments over the past two months:

Publications and Disseminations:

1. K. Sung, "Computer Games and Teaching of Computer Graphics," Invited Talk, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China, May 2007.

2. K. Sung, "Integrating Computer Gaming into Computer Graphics Courses," Microsoft Research Asia, Gaming and Graphics Workshop, Beijing, May 2007.

3. P. Shirley, K. Sung, E. Brunvand, A. Davis, S. Parker, S. Boulos, "Rethinking Graphics and Gaming Courses Because of Fast Ray Tracing," to appear in SIGGRAPH 2007 Educator’s Program Conference CD/DVD-ROM, August 2007.

4. K. Sung, M. Panitz, and R. Anderson, "Program Development with Graphical User Interface," to appear at The Journal of Computing Sciences in College, Workshop at the Ninth Annual CCSC-NW Conference, October, 2007.

5. K. Sung, and M. Panitz, "Developing Applications on the XBOX 360 Console," to appear at the The Journal of Computing Sciences in College, Workshop at the Ninth Annual CCSC-NW Conference, October, 2007.

Preparation for the above items 1&2 are the main reasons for missing the May status report. Fortunately, both were very well received. We have brought positive attention to our work, and to the Microsoft Research sponsorship. We are very excited about items 4&5, these are results from this project. We hope the experience from 4&5 will help us in preparing a successful proposal to SIGCSE 2008.

Other Publicity:

As a direct result of MSR sponsorship, our work has been widely reported:

1. On campus: UWeek article: http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?visitsource=uwkmail&articleID=32871

2. On campus: The Daily article: http://www.thedaily.washington.edu/article/2007/5/22/uwBothellProfessorUsesXboxToTeachStudents

3. KOMO TV News: contact us in late May. They are interested in showing us teaching our course with XBOX. Since school is already over at this point. We agreed to get in touch again in Fall.

4. Long-term potential collaboration: partially due to the above publicity, Dr. Brian Ross, Executive Director of The Institute for Surgical & Interventional Simulation (ISIS: http://www.isis.washington.edu/) at the UW Seattle campus contacted us about our work. The ISIS is interested in a hardware solution that involves: economical, fast, reliable, graphics device for supporting surgical simulations. The XBOX fits the description almost perfectly! We have had two meetings discussing potential future collaborations.

Work Done:

Over the past month, our project has been in full swing. We are now working full time on the assignments and we have been having multiple weekly meetings to discuss our results. For the details of the progress, please refer to:

http://faculty.washington.edu/ksung/Research/XNA_Games/MeetingMinutes/

Over the past two weeks, we have released three preliminary assignment modules to Ruth Anderson (our external faculty reviewer):

http://faculty.washington.edu/ksung/Research/XNA_Games/2007.6.R1/

http://faculty.washington.edu/ksung/Research/XNA_Games/2007.6.R2/ReleaseGuide.html

Our plan is, after receiving feedback from faculty verifying academic integrity, we will begin our industry reviews for gaming content.