Computer Science Department News

 

American Idol comes to the Computer Science Department

 

Once again, the CS033 Multimedia & Communications class had their bi-annual poster contest. The purpose of this competition is to give students an opportunity to work on a "real - live" project for a department who will use their poster as part of their major marketing campaign. They are part of a "real" process in which they are the designer and the judging panel is the client. This term, students had to design a poster to encourage high school students to think about coming to Western for Computer Science. Criteria are provided and students had to create a poster that met these criteria and the vision of the judges.

As usual, picking ten out of 300 was very difficult for the two course instructors (Laura Reid and Vivi Tryphonopoulos) because there were so many professional and highly creative posters to choose from.

Once the top ten posters were picked, the night section of CS033b had a "Computer Science Idol" show. The first judge was Dr. Mike Katchabaw, chair of the Outreach committee, aka "Randy Jackson". The second judge was Grace Sham, undergraduate student and head of the Bit By Bit Computer Camp, aka "Paula Abdul" and the last judge, the "Simon Cowell" of the group, was Doug Vancise, the undergraduate chair of Computer Science. Vivi "Ryan Seacrest" Tryphonopoulos MC'd the night.

Each of the ten finalists came to the front of the classroom and gave a brief description about the inspiration for his/her poster and took questions and comments from each of the judges. Then, the judges were given about five minutes to deliberate. The judges came up with a first place, second place and third place poster. Not only did these three students get gift certificates from the UWO bookstore, but they all will have bragging rights as their posters may end up in high schools all over Ontario to promote the Computer Science Department. The winning posters were (click on the names to see their entries):

First Place:
Carleigh Joyce
Second Place:
Kevin Fielding
Third Place:
Melanie Bergin

Honourable Mention goes to Xi Yan. His poster was very well designed but unfortunately the amazing graphic may have copyright issues, so this poster could not be used in the advertising campaign.