About The Project
9 Month Duration
The Smart Neighborhood was a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project. Its purpose was to provide virtual training experiences for students in various Energy Management disciplines. Energy Management has become a crucial component of many businesses, and as such is a rapidly growing field.
However, many of these occupations require professionals to be proficient with fairly expensive equipment out in the field. Therefore, it is more practical, both financially and in terms of safety, to create ways for students to engage with these procedures virtually.
Individual copies are available on request.
My Role
As the lead programmer, I needed to create easily extendable infrastructures for other programmers of varying skill levels to work within. Additionally, I heavily contributed to design and project management discussions and wrote tools for non-technical members of the team.
Originally, we only had one module planned, but were able to produce six. Additionally, these modules were of much higher quality than previous projects.
This page features the two projects I worked the most on.
Home Construction
Recommendations
Billy Jackman
3D Artist
"Michael is a highly skilled and organized programmer. He is able to plan out how a system will work with detailed flow charts before development begins. He can also effectively communicate his ideas to team members even if they are not programmers themselves. His communication skills made it very easy to collaborate with him on our projects. He strives to improve the quality of projects and has the skills to find and fix bugs as they may appear. Michael also brings a happy energy to the workplace and was very kind to everyone. Michael would be an excellent addition to any team."
The Home Construction module is intended to reinforce prior knowledge regarding the steps and requirements for assembling a house in Michigan.
I chose to implement the Command Design pattern, which allowed for undo, fast forward, and rewind operations in our debug menu. Given that this game models a branching 30+ step process complete with animations, this decision saved our team many hours.
Inspired Green
Inspired Green models a home energy audit and is intended for individuals who are already familiar with the basic concepts behind the various procedures involved.
Inspired Green is essentially a 3D point-and-click adventure with four levels (houses). It is also easily the largest of the modules. Much of the UI look and feel of the other modules was derived from this module.
System Architecture
While working at the Digital Innovation Institute, I created a Dynamic Link Library which contained useful classes, standalone functions, and associated editor code. I added to the library during and after each project and taught the other programmers in the lab how to take advantage of it.
In particular, UI code was reused quite heavily across each of the modules.
