Computer Science

Course Description

Computer Science taught by Mrs. Taricco is a heads-on course tackling a diverse set of skills that one could need to prepare themselves for their career. Students learn a vast range of techniques and abilities, whether it’s creating art with JavaScript, designing an app, or building websites such as this very one with HTML and CSS! The best part? No prior experience in computer science is needed to take this class.

Line Art Program

Who doesn’t love to make art? If you’ve seen my website, which I’m pretty sure you have seen as you are reading this right now, you and I both know that I do! What’s even cooler than art? Creating art online with coding! For this assignment, we experimented with how we can use straight lines to create drawings that appear to have curves. I tested how my design looked with more lines, fewer lines, a color gradient, and 20 iterations inside of itself. I think it looks pretty neat, but who am I to speak? Check it out for yourself!

Bulgarian Solitare

This was by far my favorite coding project in this class! Bulgarian Solitaire is a shuffling game that takes any triangular number of cards arranged into a random number of randomly sized piles, and moves one card from each deck to create a new one until the cards are formatted just like a game of solitaire! Interestingly, this shuffle will always eventually return to this order. Our challenge was to simulate a game of Bulgarian Solitaire using the ArrayList method in Javascript. I loved the way that I could run the program while I had a physical deck of cards in my hands, doing the shuffles myself, and having instant confirmation that my program was accurate!

Apps For Good

We spent the second half of the year working on a project known as Apps For Good, where students get in teams of three and develop an app to solve a problem in any part of everyday life. I worked with Armaan Priyadarshan and Phia Caramanica to develop an app that aids in communication between deaf patients and medical workers. Feel free to look at our problem, solution, and more details about our app further below.

Problem Statement

Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, comprising nearly 6% of the U.S. population, face significant communication barriers in emergency medical situations. Existing solutions, like interpreters, are often unreliable or unavailable, leading to stress and potential miscommunication. There is a critical need for a reliable service that enables accurate and easy communication between non-deaf doctors and deaf patients in all medical settings.

Audience

Our target audience includes general-care doctors working with deaf patients. These doctors often need to facilitate simple communications, such as asking basic questions, without relying on interpreters. The app would also benefit deaf patients, particularly in sensitive situations where involving a third party is uncomfortable. By enabling doctors to quickly learn and use relevant signs, the app aims to help the hearing community accommodate the deaf, fostering smoother and more private doctor-patient interactions.

MVP

MediSign is a mobile app that helps medical professionals communicate with deaf or hard-of-hearing patients using American Sign Language (ASL). The app includes three main features: a list of common medical questions, symptoms, and responses; retrieval of corresponding ASL signals; and display of these signals through videos. Available on both Android and iOS, MediSign uses a user-friendly interface to facilitate communication. Users start by selecting from categories of common questions, symptoms, or responses. The app then retrieves the relevant ASL signs from a database and displays them as embedded YouTube videos and reference images. This allows medical professionals to quickly learn and use ASL signs, improving interactions with their deaf or hard-of-hearing patients during appointments. Screenshots of the app are available to view below.