THE Geek Festival Sessions
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 | Attend Sessions and Win Great DOOR PRIZES! Attend these amazing learning opportunities that are offered throughout the day during "THE Geek Fest" for your opportunity to win some outstanding door prizes. Yes, there will be winners at the end of every session! Prizes range from software and gadgets to wearables and gift certificates. This year's prize contributors include X-Treme Geek, Think Geek, Office Depot, Dell, doubleHELIX, 4G Carolina, Windstream, Cricket, Sheek Geek, MatchWare, Adobe, Play N Trade, CPCC Bookstores and more!
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 | Stop-Motion Animation Goes Hi-Tech See how the hundred-year-old field of Stop-Motion Animation adopts digital technology to get stunning results such as microscopic animation made with a Smart Phone. John will also have a booth at The Geek Fest so visitors can get hands-on experience with Digital Stop-Motion.
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 | Free Cool Tools, Tips, Tricks, and Innovations What's in your toolbox? There are amazing tools, web sites, and digital resources available to enhance your online experience. Attend this session and you will be introduced to best practices, tips, tricks, and some fun geeky stuff that can help deliver innovative and engaging environments for communicating, collaborating, teaching, and learning.
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 | Click, Text and Poll Attention Students - Technology for improving today's classroom! This session will allow participants to experience the hands-on technology available in today's classroom environment. Clickers, Poll Everywhere and Google Moderator are some of the technologies that will be used.
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 | Creating a Community Engineering Design Space: A US FIRST initiative The CPCC Engineering Academy is creating an engineering design space as a community outreach initiative to promote STEM education. The main purpose of this space is to act as a “technical playground.” The presentation will include an open forum, to spark ideas, and an informal presentation. For the forum, WILD ideas are welcome and encouraged to help design a user friendly “think and do” space for for future engineers. Sit back and listen how we are already impacting the community with our first initiative hosting a regional US FIRST robotics team, YETI.
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 | Visions of the Gamepocalypse Games perpetually revolutionize computer use toward denser interaction with the human mind. To do that, they perpetually revolutionize themselves. Understanding the next frontiers of the genre is one way to understand where society is going. Jesse Schell explores the social, cognitive, and technological trends in computer game design and use. Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, the author of the authoritative text, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and a Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon, specializing in Game Design. At Walt Disney, he was Creative Director of the Imagineering VR Studio.
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 | The Social Network: Social Media Panel Discussion Social media isn’t just for socializing – learn how you can put social media to good use in your career and in your job search. In this panel discussion, we will review: trends in social media, socialnomics, building personal brand and online presence, and building career opportunities through networking.
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 | iPhone App Development: Just do it! Come find out how a college student went from knowing nothing about iPhone programming to building an app that got featured by Apple. See how the only thing limiting you from doing something big is your hesitation to just go out and do it!
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 | Harness Sun Power: Introduction to Photovoltaics Come learn how to harness the power of the sun by converting it to electricity. Photovoltaic solar panels (PV) have become much more accessible recently, and will become a critical part of our future. Learn about PV basics, where they are best suited (and not), and how you can better equip your home to use less electricity more efficiently.
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 | Geeking With Google Apps In this session, attendees will be introduced to Google Apps services and tools as well as receive some exciting tips, tricks, and highlights for using Google resources for collaborating, publishing, and managing your digital lifestyle through "cloud" computing.
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 | Gov2.0 Government collects a lot of data for many reasons. However, no one organization can imagine all the uses possible with that data. What could happen if everyone could easily access government data to use as the basis for their own analyses? Inspired by computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly’s Gov2.0 summit, this presentation highlights some of the work being done to improve both private sector and government effectiveness by increasing access to government data. It explores the idea of “government as platform” with open data, providing the basis for citizens to build useful tools with government data. A review of possibilities in this area from local government will feature the newly-released “MyCharlotte” app for the iPhone.
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 | Using Edison Nation to Turn Your Ideas into Best-Selling Products Taking the traditional route to turn an idea into a best-selling product on store shelves is expensive and takes many years of hard work. Learn how idea people are embracing the Web and using Edison Nation for a chance to make their dream products a reality with very little investment of time or money. Presented by Matt Spangard, Co-Executive Producer of PBS' invention reality series, Everyday Edisons; Co-Founder of Web 2.0 community for idea people, Edison Nation and Partner of integrated product design and engineering firm, Enventys.
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 | Augmented Reality on the Web Like a child's imagination, augmented reality blends an interactive 3D environment with our physical reality. It can overlay information on real objects (like the heads-up display in a jet pilot's goggles) or even add entirely new objects to a scene. We demonstrate how a computer can be used as a mirror, and a mobile device as a window, to create an augmented physical reality.
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 | Harnessing the Power of Microsoft Office Live Meeting Eliminate Travel Barriers and Increase Employee/Student Participation in Real Time! Explore how to keep your students or attendees engaged using integrated audio, video, and media while hosting an online “Live Meeting’ in real time. The power of Microsoft Office Live Meeting is that meeting attendees can deliver a presentation, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards, or demonstrate assignments from any computer without the hassle of traveling and meeting in person. In addition, multiple communication options are offered, including live and recorded video, chat, slide and application sharing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio, and audience feedback tools. Moreover, you can use Live Meeting to record, store and play back entire meeting or presentation for those who were not able to attend!
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 | Clean Fusion Power This Decade Finally achieving fusion energy may be closer than everyone thinks. For decades the dream has been to employ the reaction that powers stars to generate high-volume electricity without the drawbacks of fission reactors – no high-level waste, no weapons application, no risk of meltdown, no use of uranium, and (as with fission) no greenhouse gases. Ed Moses is director of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Focusing massive amounts of laser light for a billionth of a second, the NIR is expected to demonstrate ignition of a fusion reaction (more energy out than in) for the first time in the coming year, followed by the prospect of a prototype machine for generating continuous clean energy by the end of this decade. That could change everything. The NIF itself is a spectacular work of “technological sublime.”
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 | 21st century Digital Forensics: Be a Cybercrime Fighter With all the new gadgets, tools, and toys now available to the public what will a Digital Forensic Examiner do? What devices have digital evidence? Can messages be taken off a phone by the police? Join us to actually discover hidden digital evidence.
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 | Using Technology to Change the World This session will discuss how technology is being used to change the world. Examples are drawn from Imagine Cup, the premier technology student competition in the world today, and various projects underway at Microsoft Research. You will see how technology is being used to impact difficult world problems such as child mortality, environmental sustainability, and women’s rights.
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 | How new Geospatial Occupations and Competencies are Defining the GIS Profession The U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration has recently adopted five new geospatial occupations and descriptions. There has also been progress in developing DOL’s Geospatial Technology Competency Model. Simultaneously, the National Geospatial Technology Center has been working on the competencies that are required for worker success in the geospatial industry as a whole, and for GIS Technicians in particular.
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 | Music and HTML5 <audio>, <canvas>, and WebSocket provide web developers with unprecedented power over sounds, graphics, and networks. We present demos of the exciting new possibilities and show how you can use these tools in your own projects today!
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 | A Panel of Diverse STEM Professionals: Identifying Barriers and Sharing Strategies for Success Companies understand the value of diversity in fields where tasks require innovation. However, recent studies show a significant decrease in the number of women, persons with disabilities, and under-represented minorities in STEM professions. This session is an opportunity for CPCC students to participate in a guided, informal panel discussion with area STEM professionals who come from traditionally underrepresented populations. Panelists will discuss topics such as how they have broken barriers to advancement, the role of collaboration in career success, the importance of a desire to learn, taking appropriate risks, and how to balance work & family life. In this session, these professionals will also share exciting details about how a career in STEM gives you an opportunity to work daily on the forefront of innovation.
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 | Developing Apps and Games for the new Windows Phone This session will provide an overview of the new Windows Phone development platform and demonstrate how to use Silverlight and XNA framework to create apps and games.
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| Think Outside the LMS: Using Google Apps for Student Interactivity, Collaboration and More! In this session, attendees and educators will be introduced to Google Apps services and tools, as well as receive some exciting tips, tricks, and highlights for using Google resources for collaborating, publishing, and enhancing the teaching and learning environment through "cloud" computing. Come and share the experiences of faculty members as they demonstrate their uses of Google Apps to provide new learning, assessment, and collaboration options for their students and helpful tools for themselves.
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 | Give Your Students a Front Row Seat with Custom Online Video Imagine a situation where every student in your class has a front row seat, can see and hear you clearly, and can view every bit of the action taking place. What a great way to learn! By embedding custom video clips in your course website, you can provide all of your students with this type of authentic eLearning experience. And as our faculty members demonstrate, it can be a very satisfying way to make your course unique, engaging, and effective. Come join us and explore the possibilities of using a similar approach to enliven and enhance your classes.
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 | The Value of Undergraduate Research: For Students by Students Undergraduate research allows students to help researchers with their projects and gives students within the Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) fields hands-on experience while making a global impact. We will discuss how Undergraduate Research helps students become highly competitive when they transfer to four-year institutions. Students are highly encouraged to attend this session!
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 | Life's Future in the Cosmos Since the Moon landings, humans in space have done little of scientific interest, but unmanned probes have delivered revelations from the planets and moons of the solar system, with much more to come. The best prospects for finding life elsewhere in our solar system appear to be on Mars, on Saturn's moon Titan, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. (Human space exploration is best pushed by private individuals such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, rather than governments, Rees feels. Governments aren't allowed to be realistic about the dangers of space travel.)
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 | Microsoft Office Web Apps Working On Your Microsoft Office Documents Without Microsoft Office Applications! Microsoft Office Web Apps are online companions to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, giving you the ability to process Office documents with a browser. Integrated with the latest collaboration technology, Office Web Apps further enable users to work on Office documents without a locally installed instance of Office 2010. In this session we will begin with an overview of the Office Web technology followed by user scenarios including sharing and co-authoring. Attendees will learn and can get online and try immediately to create, edit, and share Office documents without a locally installed instance of Office 2010.
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 | Online Marketing and The Local Business: Why the service bundle is better. Local businesses have specific and unique marketing needs. This course will cover the basic tenets and techniques for local businesses to market their services and offerings online in order to reach a targeted and localized audience. The topics that Web Development Director John Switzer will address include the myths and facts of online advertising, do’s and don’ts when creating a website, search engine marketing – including pay-per-click principles, search engine optimization best practices, social media for local businesses and more. Switzer will also review the pros and cons for a local business of managing your own online advertising campaign and the 10 most important questions to ask any online marketer before hiring them. This session will be interactive featuring a Q&A opportunity with Switzer, and a brief state of the industry.
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 | Panopto Lecture Capture A pilot of lecture capture software has been underway at CPCC. This technology could allow for multiple components of lectures to be recorded live in class or from any computer on campus or off. The end result is a ‘rich-media’ output that students can use to listen to their instructors, watch PowerPoint presentations, and see in real-time everything that has taken place on the computer. Concluding the pilot of Panopto Coursecast Core Lecture Capture software, faculty and staff are now using this technology in exciting new ways. Attend this session to learn how Panopto can record multiple components of a lesson and seamlessly share it online. See what sets this technology apart and learn how you can begin to use this valuable instructional tool.
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| First Year CPCC Engineering Students: Innovation Project First-semester CPCC Engineering students discuss and showcase their Innovation Project from the “Introduction to Engineering” class. Students will demonstrate their abilities to: Develop and construct an innovative solution that meets design and performance requirements. Students will also communicate the solution, approach, performance results, and lessons learned. Attendees witness and feel the dedication and excitement of these students as they work together to accomplishing common goals. A more detailed description of the project can be viewed HERE. Questions are encouraged and welcomed!
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 | Top 10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media This session will introduce attendees with relevant and thoughtful best practices practices for social media and online networking through the feature the work of Iggy Pintado, a renowned Social Media / Business networking expert and author of "Connection Generation." Iggy resides in Syndey, Australia and as a “super-connected” networker on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, has earned his place in the Top 25 list of the most connected business networkers in Australia.
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 | Mobile Applications Attend this discussion and demonstration on how apps for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices can help in the classroom and with general productivity. Share what you already use and find out what else is out there. Some specific apps we will discuss are Evernote, Dropbox and Instapaper.
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 | Good Content: The Case for Effective Copywriting as Told to Geeks A business' success depends on how well its story is conveyed to prospects. That's why a good website is only as good as the copy telling the story. This session will equip web developers and other biz minded geek-types with: The imperative value of advancing beyond optimized search rankings into the realm of web pages with stories that effectively sell products and services. Skills to recognize good copy and bad copy and an understanding of when to create and when find a vendor. At the end of this session, attendees will be prepared to help their customers tell their stories in a way that inspires buying.
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Other Relevant Resources and Information | |
 | CPCC Employees Earn PD Credit! Yes, CPCC employees can earn Professional Development (PD) credit for attending many TGF2010 sessions! To take advantage of this opportunity, login to LearnerWeb and register for Geek Fest sessions listed on the schedule. A sign-in sheet will be presented at these sessions for employees to sign-up for credit. |
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