I just got word that I was chosen as one of the two winners of this year's award for teaching assistants in our department.  Even better, the other winner was one of my TA's the first summer I taught!

I was nominated for my term as TA this past fall.  I TA'ed for our third year game development course, which focuses on 3D graphics.  In addition to the usual grading and office hours, I maintained a course blog, guest lectured, and held an informal tutorial before the midterm.

A good friend and colleague of mine, Serena Ngai, recently started an Ottawa chapter for Girl Develop It.  I have been helping her get things off the ground and recently taught at our very first event.

We decided to hold a free, one-day workshop that would give attendees a taste of programming and have them wanting to come back for the more extensive, multi-day classes to be offered later on.  Our workshop was called Intro to Scratch Programming and was a great success!

The slides I used at the event are available for download in the following formats:

• PowerPoint 2007 (includes extra information in the notes section)
• PDF

I had entered a photo into an Our Canada Magazine contest a while back.  I didn't win, but they liked the photo and wanted to publish it in an upcoming issue.  I just got a copy of the magazine and was proud to see the below photo with a selection of other great shots, all related to fishing.  I think this is the first time I've officially been published.

I was recently featured in The Huffington Post! As part of their series on women in tech, I was number 12 and one of the only pracising technologists in their original list of 27 women in tech to follow on Twitter.  (Also read my blog post about it.)

I'm very excited to announce that I'll be demoing Gram's House at this year's Games for Change Festival.  Even though the game did not make it through the first round of the Imagine Cup game design competition, I knew there was something special about the overall design that hasn't quite been done before.  And so, thanks to some awesome contacts, I now have an opportunity to get feedback on the demo we've made so far and maybe, if I'm lucky, find some collaborators who can help develop it further (after all, the best parts of the design never made it into the demo).

In March I competed in the 2011 Nicol Challenge with an idea for a novel and mobile app designed to get girls interested in computer science.  I was one of 8 finalists.  I wrote about the experience on my blog.

This past weekend I competed with Team Harmony in the Great Canadian Appathon.  We managed to successfully submit a working game after the 48 hour game development competition.  I wrote about the experience on my blog, and was featured in the National Post (Financial Post) in an article called "Female developers crashing the boys club."

Today my team and I submitted our first demo version of Gram's House, a game we designed to give girls a more positive perspective on computer science.  The details are posted in the Research section's current projects.

I was recently invited to join the ABI Board of Advisors.  I'm very excited about this opportunity and look forward to helping guide the direction of the organization.