Brown has just started a snappy new publication. "Inside Brown: News, People, and Ideas at the University" put out its first number this week, and we're proud to say that this debut issue features not one but two CS faculty.
The article "Online Philanthropy: from the Clink of a Coin to the Click of a Mouse" describes at more length last semester's student project in Steve Reiss's CS 9-3, noted in our news article of November 24, 2004 (http://www.cs.brown.edu/news/2004/1124.Charities.html). In this project, initiated by WPRI journalist Pat Mastors and her husband Jim, the students built a robust one-stop Web site for charitable action that is searchable on multiple criteria and also integrates information from GuideStar on the financial, mission, and administrative status of almost a million charitable organizations. Students continue to work with the Mastorses to refine and develop the Web site.
On the same page, the article "Softwater Seminar Reaches Out to Area Educators" describes the Educational Software Seminar (created more than a decade ago by Andy van Dam and now taught by Roger Blumberg) as another CS course in which "students work for the public good". Students in this course design and develop software proposed by local teachers; last year's software projects were a vocabulary game aimed at kindergarteners, proposed by teacher Ellen Lynch of the Vartan Gregorian Elementary School in Fox Point, an interactive program on the history of bridge design and construction, proposed by third-grade teacher Betsy Hunt of Lincoln School in Providence, and a reading comprehension program for eighth-graders, proposed by Martin Carruso of Nathan Bishop Middle School in Providence. This software is on the Web at http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/cs92.download.html.
The complete "Inside Brown" is on the Web at http://www.brown.edu/Administration/InsideBrown/
