Welcome to My Web Page!

My name is Connor Brem, and I'm a sophomore majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm a Pittsburgh native, and I've loved attending school in my hometown.

I'm interested in software development and computer science education, and over the course of my education at CMU, I hope to experience computers at as many levels of abstraction as possible.

I'm currently employed as a Course Assistant for 15-112, CMU's introductory programming course for students in Computer Science, ECE, and other technical majors. It's been a great experience, and I hope to continue teaching in some capacity for the rest of my time at school.

Check out my past and current projects or my resume if you're interested!

My Projects

1-Down

1-Down is a Mario-inspired game written in JavaScript and based around HTML5 canvas. Play it here! It borrows most of its graphics from the original Super Mario Brothers games, but diverges entirely after that! All levels are procedurally generated, so no two plays through will be the same.

I developed 1-Down with a team of two other students for a mobile web application development class. We're currently enrolled in the class, so we'll be making quite a few more web applications in the near future!

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Lichtgeschwindigkeit

Lichtgeschwindigkeit (German for "light-speed") is a relativistic physics game that I developed as part of an introductory programming course during my first semester at CMU. It's written in Python using the Tkinter graphics package. It was the first significant piece of software that I developed!

In Lichtgeschwindigkeit, you play as a spaceship drifting through the solar system and other nearby star systems. These star systems may seem oddly close together, but other than that detail, the physics are real! As you accelerate to higher speeds, the effects of special relativity become more and more noticable: you burn more fuel, your on-ship clock slows down, the shape and color of the ship change, and (most importantly) you're utterly unable to surpass the speed of light! Your speed, your position, the degree to which you are affected by relativity, and other useful data are visible in the sidebars as you fly. After you complete a level, you gain the option to replay that level while racing against a "ghost" of your best time.

The original Python files are available here on Github. Bug fixes and a mobile version are coming soon!

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Mechanical Logic

I'm currently co-leading an effort to produce mechanical logic gates and an accompanying curriculum. My team and I hope to develop gates which are both reliable and clear enough for us to take into local schools and teach high- and middle-school students about the basics of boolean algebra.

We believe that boolean algebra, though extremely useful and intuitive, is overlooked in secondary schools because of its differences from conventional algebra. We hope that a mechanical representation of boolean algebra will present students with a quick route to understanding this amazing concept.

We're currently working on our fourth series of gate designs. We hope to finalize these designs and deploy the gates to schools by March/April 2013. Check out the project site here!

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Mastermind on an FPGA

As part of Structure and Design of Digital Systems, a course on digital logic and processor design, I designed a circuit which allows two participants to play a game of Mastermind. All code for the project was written by myself and another student in SystemVerilog, a hardware programming language, and then implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).