Mitchell Philipp
Hi, I'm Mitchell. I am a first-year student attending Georgia Tech for a BS in Computational Media. I game, code, and write.
Computational Media?
You probably have no idea what Computational Media (CM) is. (It's not very common.) Basically, CM studies anywhere that digital technology and media meet. That includes everything from video game design to human-computer interaction to digital art, although I personally chose it because I want to make games.
Games
I have wanted to make video games for about as long as I can remember. I've always had ideas for games that I think would be interesting and fun to play, so I'm excited to be attending college to learn the skills I need. I have worked on no less than five completed game projects in my first year at Tech, for two of which I was the primary gameplay and UI programmer. The 'Games' tab at the top of this page provides a few examples of what I've worked on.
Coding
Aside from the coding I do to make games, I have other code-based projects. I've been coding since I was twelve years old, and since then I've made everything from websites to games to a Twitter bot that plays hangman with you and Atlanta public transportation. To see some assorted projects I've worked on, check out the 'Miscellaneous' tab above.
Writing
I enjoy writing. I tend to experiment with the format and genre of what I write, so it's hard to describe succinctly, but I try to keep a sense of humor in it. Feel free to take a look in the 'Writing' tab above.
Games
- Cyborg Chameleon Syndication: The Biohackathon to Freedom
-
Cyborg Chameleon Syndication is a keyboard multiplayer game about biohacking a technologically augmented chameleon to get it out of an abstract hedge maze. It's like a biological game of football! This game was created for my Intro to Computational Media class (LMC 2700) at Georgia Tech, working with Olivia Kiklica.
- NumberGrid
-
I found a puzzle on an online forum, and it involved enough math just to solve it that I figured it might be easier to solve if a computer was automatically testing the solutions I tried. So, I made this online version of the puzzle. It features color coded feedback, a section for keeping notes on the puzzle, and automatic saving to the browser.
Writing
- Article Reports
-
In my senior year of high school, I took a computer science class in which we had to do a monthly assignment of an 'article report'. It had simple requirements: find a technology-related article from the past three months and write a few sentences summarizing the article, and a few sentences of opinion about it. You also had to write a comment on two other people's article reports. The thing is, the interface we used to turn in these article reports actually allowed you to input raw HTML to display the report. Being someone interested in web development, I jumped at the opportunity to use the HTML editor to experiment with the format and appearance of my reports. I shortly realized, however, that the system would remove any scripts or css from the submission when I clicked 'submit'. Fortunately, though, it did not remove any iframes or embedded content from the submission, so I began writing my article reports in HTML and hosting them on a separate server, then just submitting an embedded version of my report.
After experimenting with the format for a few months, I also began experimenting with the content. I started using the 'Opinion' section of my reports to write longer and longer opinions, where I increasingly used satire and humor to liven up the writing. I started using the assignments to explore using different types of tone and content.
While I am no longer in that class, I still sometimes use that format to practice my humorous writing skills and give myself a laugh. I host all of them on this website, so feel free to take a look. - Word Problems
- As a hobby, I like to write humorous word problems. You know the textbook problems that say things like "Jonovan has 37 watermelons in his cart" that make you think more about why the hell Jonovan is buying all those watermelons than about the actual math problem? Imagine that, but taken to the extreme. My word problems can spend a full page of exposition explaining how the situation came about, and then only a single sentence of a trivial math problem. I use these as an opportunity to practice my creative writing within a constrained format. I also have a few slide decks of shorter word problems that I had to make for various classes, which I took as an opportunity to write shorter, more to the point jokes into the problems. Feel free to browse.
Class Projects
- Cyborg Chameleon Syndication: The Biohackathon to Freedom
-
Cyborg Chameleon Syndication is a keyboard multiplayer game about biohacking a technologically augmented chameleon to get it out of an abstract hedge maze. It's like a biological game of football! This game was created for my Intro to Computational Media class (LMC 2700) at Georgia Tech, working with Olivia Kiklica.
- Marta Man: A Twitter Bot that Plays Hangman
-
Marta Man is a Twitter bot that plays Hangman with you and avidly supports Atlanta public transport. Tweet at him to start a game of Hangman, and reply to him with letters of the alphabet to make guesses. This Twitter bot was created for my Intro to Computational Media class (LMC 2700) at Georgia Tech, working with Olivia Kiklica.
- Classical Conditioning Project
- This project was created for my Intro to Psychology class (PSYC 1101) at Georgia Tech. For the project, my group had to design an experiment to demonstrate the effect of classical conditiioning, as first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. Our experiment was designed to condition a lecture hall full of people to clap when they see the color red. They are instructed to clap when they see the word 'clap', and we only show the color red when the word 'clap' is shown. Eventually, we remove the word and only show the color red, and we expect them to still clap when they see the red because they have formed an implicit association between it and the action of clapping.
Miscellaneous
- Marta Man: A Twitter Bot that Plays Hangman
-
Marta Man is a Twitter bot that plays Hangman with you and avidly supports Atlanta public transport. Tweet at him to start a game of Hangman, and reply to him with letters of the alphabet to make guesses. This Twitter bot was created for my Intro to Computational Media class (LMC 2700) at Georgia Tech, working with Olivia Kiklica.
- SVG Clock
-
I created this animated clock that uses JavaScript to get the system time and use it to set the position of the hands. I thought it looked pretty cool.