Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Student ThinSat Research Summer (STRS) Camp was held virtually from August 3 – August 14, 2020. The event was sponsored by a Virginia Space Grant Consortium  Innovate Program grant with faculty and student instructors from  Computer Science and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Old Dominion University.  STRS 2020 - Flyer   The STRS camp focused on providing opportunities for integration of coding skills with  engineering Standards of Learning for students in a project-based learning environment using ThinSat .  The Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority  (Virginia Space) , as a part of their commitment to K-  12 STEM outreach, has initiated a program called  ThinSat, inserting batches of approximately 60  picosatellites into extremely low Earth orbits up to  twice a year. ThinSats are launched utilizing the  second stage orbit insertion capabilities of their  Antares launch system as part of regularly scheduled  International Space Station resupply flights.

" How did you learn programming? ", a student asked me in a recent summer camp. Dr. Yaohang Li organized the Machine Learning and Data Science Summer Camp  for High School students of the Hampton Roads metropolitan region at the Department of Computer Science, Old Dominion University  from June 25 to July 9, 2018. The camp was funded by the  Virginia Space Grant Consortium . More than 30 students participated in it. They were introduced to a variety of topics such as Data Structures, Statistics, Python, R, Machine Learning, Game Programming, Public Datasets, Web Archiving, and Docker etc. in the form of discussions, hands-on labs, and lectures by professors and graduate students. I was invited to give a lecture about my research and Docker . At the end of my talk I solicited questions and distributed Docker swag. The question "How did you learn programming?" led me to draw Tic-Tac-Toe Game and a 3x3 Magic Square on the white board. Then I told them a more t