"Marble logic" brings Boolean logic to your coffee table in a playful way. Our kit is designed to make Boolean logic easy to understand and fun to play with. We built a small Boolean computer marble slide kit. We built a gate for each one of the basic Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT). The gates can be put together with track to evaluate Boolean statements. For example, NOT A OR (B AND C). The gates receive input in the form of marbles. A variable is considered true if a marble is put into the corresponding track and false if no marble is put in the track. So, in this case, the slide would have inputs for the variables A, B and C. The entire marble slide produces output by either releasing a marble or not. Although, our kit does not reflect true Boolean logic (which would require a continuous flow of marbles) this kit can be used for teaching Boolean logic in a fun and visual way. FINAL REPORT

In adding computation to a construction kit, we decided that we would work on word recognition on an off-the-shelf set of alphabet blocks. We decided that the best approach was to use a web-cam to get an image, then we would use optical character recognition (OCR) software to recognize and display each word. One main consideration when coming up with the project idea was whether to build a small bit of computation into each piece, or to build the computation into an intelligent observer. We decided that building an intelligent observer is the more interesting problem. The intelligent observer idea can be used in many cases, and once written well, it will work within many pre-existing environments. FINAL REPORT

Molecular modeling provides a means of expressing complex ideas in chemistry in an intuitive, concrete manner. Computers are already heavily used in the field as a means of storing enormous databases of information about molecules, chemical properties, spectral data, and reactions, and as a means of visualizing complex molecules in three dimensions. Presented here is the beginning of a project to pull together currently separate technologies and integrate them into a powerful, functional, yet simple to use interface to enhance the capabilities of both physical molecular models and the vast software resources currently available. The design process for this construction kit reveals a number of the issues that would need to be addressed before this kit could be realized in a truly meaningful form, especially with respect to the implementation of the physical modeling set. The current form of the kit sidesteps the hardware issue, choosing instead to provide input that models the way the hardware would likely communicate with the software by using a barcode labeling system and a barcode scanner. The final software design establishes base classes for storing information about atoms and molecules as well as providing a few rudimentary manipulation functions and a comparison routine for matching a model against a small database of known molecules. FINAL REPORT