Students in E7 Intro to Computing solve Cal Band Challenge

Featured Faculty: Fotini Katopodes Chow

E7 students were surprised when the Cal Band came marching into the auditorium half way through lecture.

The Band kicked off the final project for CEE Professor Tina Chow's E7 (Introduction to Computer Programming for Scientists and Engineers). E7, required for most engineering majors, has 400 students, mostly freshmen. Students worked in teams of 2 or 3 to automate the process of planning Band performances, potentially saving the Band hundreds of hours per year.

 

The Band performs at halftime at home football games as well as some away games. It creates formations on the field while marching and playing music. Each marcher follows instructions on where to stand, and how to move from one formation to the next.
 

Mapping the transitions between formations is time-consuming and difficult. Transitions can involve 180 marchers. Planners specify an exact route to traverse while playing. Each marcher makes the transition in a certain number of steps, corresponding to the number of beats in the music.

And no 2 marchers can collide!

 


 

E7 students were tasked with writing a computer program to coordinate transitions between any 2 formations. It can take the Band 2-10 hours to manually plan a transition. At 6-8 transitions per show, planning transitions can be a time-consuming process. The challenge was to automate this process, optimizing the marchers' movements and potentially enabling more complicated designs.

The Cal Band during halftime, Super Bowl 2016.

This project was difficult and had no known solution. "Which marcher should go where? Could the marchers get from their initial position to their target position in time? Would there be any collisions?"

Overall the project was a great success. All teams got experience writing complex code and working together in groups on an open-ended project. Most students were able to create programs to assign new positions to band members.

A few groups even managed to design efficient and effective algorithms to complete the transitions without any collisions!

The project would not have been possible without the hard work of the E7 Graduate Student Instructors, with special thanks to GSIs Brad Harken and Lucas Bastien.

All participants are excited to see the algorithms become integrated into the software the Cal Band uses to create their shows.

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