When: November 21st, 2013, doors at 630pm, talks at 7pm!

Where: LIVE, 102 S First St, Ann Arbor

Moola: $5

Tickets: At the door or http://nna2november.eventbrite.com

November will show us how robotics is an engineer’s team sport, how anyone at all can be a video game developer (no experience required!), and how communism just did a really bang-up job showing its usefulness. Just spectacular. The line-up:

Ken & Kaleb Fox – FIRST Robotics: Team Sport for Engineers

FIRST FRC (backronym meaning For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an international robotics competition involving over 2,800 high school teams and 71,000 students. It was started in 1989 by Dean Kamen “to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.” Each year teams have 6 weeks to imagine, design and build a robot able to play that year’s game. The games have never repeated, but they are always played 3 vs 3 on an enclosed field about the size of a basketball court. The robots weigh 150 pounds

and draw 120 amps. These aren’t roombas! This talk will give an insider’s view into a build and competition season.

About Ken & Kaleb Fox:

Kaleb is a student at Skyline High School and a member of Eagle Imperium Team 3322 http://www.skylinerobotics.org/. Ken is a software engineer at Atomic Object in Ann Arbor and a FIRST Robotics mentor. They’ve been with the team for 2 years. When not working on robots, their passions include cooking, anime, reading and board gaming. Well Kaleb anyways–Ken’s pretty much obsessed with robots.

Jennifer Marsman – You don’t have to be a computer nerd: How any nerd can build a cool game to publish in an app store



I discovered a very cool tool called Construct 2 (made by a company called Scirra) which allows you to easily create compelling games. You simply add backgrounds and sprites on a page, and use an “event sheet” of simple if-then statements to define your game logic. The game can then be exported as an iOS, Android, Windows Store, or Windows Phone app. There are also templates/tutorials to get you started creating a shooter game, physics puzzle, driving game, and platform game (like Super Mario Brothers). I’ll demo how easy and fun this is! All nerds will leave knowing the fundamentals to build a wicked cool game.

About Jennifer Marsman:

Jennifer Marsman is a Principal Developer Evangelist in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, where she educates developers on Microsoft’s new technologies. Jennifer is a frequent speaker at software development conferences across the United States. In 2009, Jennifer was chosen as “Techie whose innovation will have the biggest impact” by X-OLOGY for her work with GiveCamps, a weekend-long event where developers code for charity. Prior to this role, Jennifer was a software developer in Microsoft’s Natural Interactive Services division, where she earned two patents for her work in search and data mining algorithms. Jennifer holds a BSE in Computer Engineering and MSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her graduate work specialized in artificial intelligence and computational theory. Jennifer blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/jennifer and tweets at http://twitter.com/jennifermarsman.

Marcus Dillon – Communism’s Greatest Hits

The communist utopia experiments of the 20th century did not go as well as planned. Often the failures were horrific. The rest of the time they were horrific and pure comedy gold. In this presentation, we’ll be covering 10 of the funniest and most ludicrous goofs, fuckups, and fails by communist dictatorships from all over the world. Fun is mandatory. All surplus popcorn will be confiscated. Insufficient applause at the end will be regarded as anti-revolutionary.

About Marcus Dillon:

Marcus is an Ann Arbor native and has undergraduate degrees in US and Chinese history. He writes jokes on the internet pseudonymously. The Canadian border police have made it clear that he is no longer welcome in that country. He is totally unqualified to speak on any topic at any event, but hey, he works for free.