Aaron Bauer
Developer Educator
I was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Carleton College 2019-2022. I'm currently a Developer Educator with Jane Street based in New York City.
I enjoy musical theater, hiking, Dungeons & Dragons, and writing about history.
I work across a broad range of areas on projects related to problem solving, educational technology, and learning. My work focuses on understanding how users in Foldit and other open-ended environments learn, behave strategically, and collaborate. This research deals with questions of human-computer problem-solving, collaboration, and large-scale data analysis.
Some of my other work focuses on creating games (such as Dragon Architect) and other educational systems, and exploring how best to design and use these tools. Other projects center on AI-assisted mixed-initiative game design tools. I explore ways to augment the human designer and allow them to work at the level of playspace properties (i.e., mechanical properties of gameplay) rather than raw level geometry.
While getting my PhD at University of Washington, I was part of the Center for Game Science and advised by Zoran Popović .
Carleton:
At University of Washington, I taught CSE 374: Intermediate Programming Concepts and Tools and CSE 373: Data Structures and Algorithms.
Every Summer since 2014 I have been a programming instructor for the Summer Science Program (SSP), an intensive, five-week residential program for advanced high school students.
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Aaron Bauer, Zoran Popović, Collaborative Problem Solving in an Open-Ended Scientific Discovery Game, in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 1, issue CSCW, article no. 22, 2017. Best Paper Award. [pdf] |
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Aaron Bauer, Jeff Flatten, Zoran Popović, Analysis of problem-solving behavior in open-ended scientific-discovery game challenges, in Proceedings of the Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017). [pdf] |
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Aaron Bauer, Eric Butler, Zoran Popović, Dragon Architect: Open Design Problems for Guided Learning in a Creative Computational Thinking Sandbox Game, in Proceedings of the Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2017). [pdf] |
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Aaron Bauer, Seth Cooper, Zoran Popović, Automatic Redesign of Local Playspace Properties, in Proceedings of the Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2013). [pdf] |
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Aaron Bauer, Zoran Popović, RRT-based game level analysis, visualization, and visual refinement, in Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2012). [pdf] |
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Brian Koepnick, Jeff Flatten, Tamir Husain, Alex Ford, Daniel-Adriano Silva, Matthew J. Bick, Aaron Bauer, Gaohua Liu, Yojiro Ishida, Alexander Boykov, Roger D. Estep, Susan Kleinfelter, Toke Nørgård-Solano, Linda Wei, Foldit Players, Gaetano T. Montelione, Frank DiMaio, Zoran Popović, Firas Khatib, Seth Cooper, David Baker, De novo protein design by citizen scientists, in Nature, 2019. [link] |
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Rónadh Cox, Aaron Bauer, Impact breaching of Europa's ice: Constraints from numerical modeling, in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, vol. 120, no. 10, pp. 1708--1719, 2015. [pdf] [youtube] [Daily Mail] |
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Aaron Bauer, Eric Butler, Zoran Popović, Approaches for Teaching Computational Thinking Strategies in an Educational Game: A Position Paper, in Proceedings of the Blocks and Beyond workshop at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2015). [pdf] |
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Aaron Bauer, Eleanor O’Rourke, Kyle Thayer, Eric Butler, Whitaker Brand, Stuart Reges, Practicum: a scalable online system for faded worked examples in CS1. UW-CSE-18-09-01. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. University of Washington, Seattle. 2018. [pdf] |
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Rónadh Cox, Aaron Bauer, Crust-Breaching Impacts at Europa: Hydrocode Models and Geomorphologic Constraints on Ice Thickness, Poster at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting & Exposition (GSA 2011). [conference abstract] |
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Aaron W. Bauer, Rónadh Cox. Hydrocode modeling of impacts at Europa, Poster at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2011). [poster][conference abstract][video] |
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Aaron W. Bauer, Tomasz F. Stepinski, Machine Cataloging of Lunar Craters from Digital Terrain Model, Poster at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2011). [conference abstract] |
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Aaron W. Bauer, Rónadh Cox, Veronica J. Bray, Hydrocode modeling of ice-penetrating impacts on Jupiter's moon, Europa, Poster at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting & Exposition (GSA 2010). [conference abstract] |
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CS 111 Introduction to Computer Science: Recorded Lectures [youtube] |
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CS 201 Data Structures: Recorded Lectures [youtube] |
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CS 208 Introduction to Computer Systems: Recorded Lectures [youtube-f21, youtube-s22] |
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CS 332 Operating Systems: Recorded Lectures [youtube] |
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CS 334 Database Systems: Video Lectures [youtube] |
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CS 334: Video Outro Compilation [youtube] |
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What is an Operating System? [youtube] |
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Happy Birthday Mr. President: The Herbert Hoover Edition [link] |
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Preparing America for World War II: Franklin Roosevelt, Isolationism, and America First [link] |
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How Certain was Allied Victory in WWII? [link] |