Michael C. Slattery

Computer games and CS education: why and how

Computer and video games have grown to be a major industry but, until recently, have largely been ignored by academia. The last couple of years, however, have seen the emergence of new academic programs, conferences, and journals dedicated to games studies. This panel discusses a variety of ways, and whys, for introducing games into computer science curricula. Panelists discuss their experiences in designing a broad range of courses including a games course for women, a software development course that uses games as projects, an introductory games programming course in Java, and an advanced graphics course that focuses on games.

Certain Roman and flock generalized quadrangles have nonisomorphic elation groups

We prove that the elation groups of a certain infinite family of Roman generalized quadrangles are not isomorphic to those of associated flock generalized quadrangles.

Computing subgroups of bounded index in a finite group

We describe a practical algorithm for computing representatives of the conjugacy classes of subgroups up to a given index in a finite group. This algorithm has been implemented in Magma, and we present some performance statistics.

Computing Double Cosets in Soluble Groups

We discuss the use of orbit-stabilizer and orbit reduction techniques for computing representatives of double cosets in finite soluble groups given by a polycyclic presentation.

Generation of groups of square-free order

Algorithms are described for the enumeration and recognition of groups whose order is a product of distinct primes. The focus is on providing access to isomorphism classes of such groups by computing representatives as needed rather than storing a large database of precomputed groups.