BOOM Showcase Returns to Dufeld

By CHRISTOPHER WALKER Sun Contributor

Following a three-year, COVID-19-induced hiatus, Bits On Our Mind — an annual showcase of technological projects created by Cornell students — returned to Duffield Hall on April 27 for its 25th anniversary, with students exhibiting projects such as multiplayer games, an algorithm that quantifies xenophobia and a map of New York City’s trees made using remote sensing technology.

The showcase provides project teams with the opportunity to receive public feedback, network with industry professionals and win monetary awards and trophies distributed by representatives from BOOM’s sponsor companies and faculty at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

This year’s BOOM attendees included Cornell students and faculty, local Ithaca residents and Code Red Robotics, a high school robotics club local to Ithaca. People of all ages were invited to attend the event — though Danica Rickards, the Cornell Bowers CIS program coordinator and BOOM committee chair, emphasized the importance of youth engagement with science, technology, engineering and math.

“Cornell Bowers CIS wants to help young people from all backgrounds learn about opportunities in tech, so that they will have the chance to pursue satisfying and much-needed careers in the STEM fields, if they so choose,” Rickards said.

The presented projects run the gamut of technological capabilities. Some students presented video games designed for players’ enjoyment — such as Cosmic Swing, Eudaemon and No Screws Attached. Other projects were physical products that BOOM attendees could interact with — like Spectrumsheet, which allows its users to compose their own music using paint markers that correspond to music notes, and the Bookkeeper, an inconspicuous device disguised as a stack of books, in which users can store distracting devices.

“The Bookkeeper… looks like an ordinary stack of books, but the top book is real and the rest are fake,” said Bookkeeper creator Joshua Blair grad. “When you pull off the top book, the platform rises up, giving you LEDs, and the bottom book is actually a secret compartment [that stores your distracting devices]. So basically this keeps track of how long you’ve been reading and then once you hit [your reading goal time] you can put the book back… pop it open [and] grab your [distractions].”

Many BOOM presenters expressed the desire to remedy problems faced by the Cornell community — such as Rica Craig ’23, the creator of Ithaca Hunt. Designed with first-year students as the target users, Ithaca Hunt is an app that seeks to help new Cornell students acclimate to Ithaca by connecting them to other students and local businesses and events.

“The project was for Information Science 3450: Human-Computer Interaction Design, where we had to design a solution surrounding a user problem we identified earlier in the semester,” Craig said. “So, we decided that the target audience will be first-year students who want to explore outside of campus but didn’t know how to do so.”

Similarly, the team behind Resell, an app that allows students to list and sell used items, hopes to provide solutions to on-campus sustainability. The app helps users reuse existing goods and alleviate the waste that comes with discarding clothing during move-out.

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