The Software Development Lab, located in the William F. Walsh Science Center Room 101, supports the first four courses in the computer science major sequence. In addition, it is the lab environment for the Database and Data-Driven Web Application Development courses, the User Interface course, and two Computer Graphics courses. The lab originated with a National Science Foundation Award 9551854 for the support of an innovative computer graphics course for non-majors.
The original 16 machines were high-end, dual boot (Windows and Linux). The equipment has been updated on several occasions including, most recently, the addition of two machines with high-end graphics processing units. Software on the machines include the IDE Eclipse and Java, Visual Studio and C#, SQL Server, and development environments specific to computer graphics programming. Computer Science majors and students in the supported courses have 24-hour access to the lab.
The Bonaventure Robotics Laboratory supports the integration of robotics into the undergraduate computer science curriculum and permits experimentation with behavior control algorithms. The lab is located in room 103 of the William F. Walsh Science Center. The current robotics equipment was purchased two grants. National Science Foundation CCLI-AI Grant 9980999 in 2000 enabled the purchase of eight robotics workstations based on the Khepera miniature robot, hardware for object manipulation and vision, and a larger Koala robot.
A 2007 grant from the George I. Alden Trust enabled the Department to purchase a PeopleBot robot, a full-sized robot that is designed to interact with people. The lab supports the Department's Robotics and Computer Vision course, CS 342, and original research under faculty supervision by its undergraduates. Seven undergraduates have served as co-authors of the labs technical reports listed below.