Department of Computer Science

CodeMontana, a program for introducing high school students across Montana to computer coding, will now be administered by Montana Tech through the Computer Science Department. The program was created by Greg Gianforte and Rob Irizarry to introduce junior high and high school students to computer programming at earlier ages. CodeMontana’s relocation is being made possible by a gift of $220,000 from the Gianforte Family Foundation. 

CodeMontana will continue as the same program, but its new home will offer further mentorship for CodeMontana students from current Computer Science students at Tech. The added mentorship will encourage students to complete CodeMontana and motivate them to choose a career in Computer Science or Software Engineering. Montana Tech will continue to offer the $4000 CodeMontana Scholarship to students who complete the first 4 modules and have a Math ACT score of 24 or higher.

Recent graduates working at Microsoft got together for a photo to share with the department. Pictured are Jordan Yates, Haythem Memmi, and Matt Morris. Haythem Memmi just started at Microsoft after graduating in December 2014. He is a Software Development Engineer working for the Dynamic Crawling Team at Bing. Matt Morris (May 2014) started at Microsoft six months ago and works as a Software Engineer for the Storage Management API team in the Operating Systems Group. Jordan Yates is also a Software Engineer in the Operating Systems Group and works on the Developer Ecosystem Platform team.

Over the summer and fall of 2014, at least nine Montana Tech computer science and software engineering students interned at a wide variey of companies, from Amazon and Cobalt in Seattle, to Echostar in Colorado and CISCO in Silicon Valley to several local companies in Butte. If a student enrolls in the Internship course, we asked them to share their internship experiences on the Computer Science Department website. Make sure to read the entire article and return for additional internships as students submit their reports.  Articles about Garrett Brown, Justin Emge, Scott Fleener, and Haythem Memmi are below. Not all students signup for internship credit, so there are many additional companies where our students are interning each summer.

Garrett Brown, a double major in Computer Science and Software Engineering entering his senior year, spent the summer and fall of 2014 with the National Center for Healthcare Informatics in Butte. His work was on designing and implementing a full profile mission scenario for an Air Force Special Forces training simulation. His role consisted of researching technologies that could be applied to adding realism to the scenario, such as force feedback, as well as creating content for the scenario. For most of the internships duration, Garrett worked with the help of a technical director and a former Air Force Para-rescue man. Throughout the internship, Garrett worked closely with representatives of the companies whose technologies were to be integrated into the simulation environment. The project uses existing technologies with Python and Lua scripts communicating between them. Using geographic information system (GIS) technologies and the MACE/VRSG simulation environment, he developed a realistic training scenario. Garrett learned of this internship through the faculty of Montana Tech, as it is a local organization.

A CBS Special Assignment reports on CodeMontana one year later. The report includes an interview with CS Department Head Jeff Braun and video coverage of Celia Schahczenski's Discrete Structures class and the Museum Building computer lab. The special feature mentions both the $4000 CodeMontana Scholarship and the CSCI 191 CodeMontana: Intro to CS course, which will be offered again next spring.