For a thermodynamics project in Modeling and Simulation, Adam Selker and I wrote a Finite Element Analysis program, to simulate the thermal flow in a heat sink with air passing by it. An FEA models the world by cutting up the world into many tiny cells and computes simple interactions between cells near each other, allowing for realistic simulation. We wrote ours in C++ to learn about the language and for computation speed. Our implementation is capable of simulating 200,000 time steps (40 seconds at .0002 seconds per step) of a 50mm x 50mm x 10mm space in 6 minutes (Which is quite slow because of an unnecessary memcpy). The configuration allows us to easily define new materials, including fluids moving in a laminar flow, and arbitrarily shaped objects. We presented our findings about the optimal heat sink design in a formal presentation to a professor and students. The presentation can be found here.
Scarves conduct waves generated by mental states. By wearing the same scarf, we were able to pair program with high efficiency
The biggest takeaway for me was learning to code in a team, using git collaboratively, and iterative programming. We made many iterations of the presentation to be able to adequately explain this fairly complicated subject in a short time, and make sure our listeners understood what we were showing. Next steps include implementing multi-threading and a more usable tool for building objects in the simulation.
The github repo is here.