PIPE

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PIPE (Programming in Pure English) is a console application turns English language sentences into C for Botball robots. This project won Best of Computer Science at the 2014 Honolulu District Science Fair and earned the Computer Sciences Award from the University of Hawaii at Manoa Department of Computer Sciences at the 2014 Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair.

After a command is entered, the program scans for keywords mapped to selected commands in the Botball C library (based on the 2013 Student Developers Kit) and translates them into C file that is ready for Botball robots to run.


This was my first-ever programming project using the first programming language I learned. Now that I am real software developer, I feel that it was probably a bad idea for a high school junior to pick C as his first programming language. It was definitely a huge learning curve from teaching myself how to program to creating an application that accomplishes a goal.

What drove me to create PIPE was my desire to simplify programming for beginning programmers. From this high school science fair project, I had my first experience with Natural Language Processing (a popular topic in Computer Science) and learned basic C concepts such as if-statements, for-loops, pointers and I/O. The learning curve of this project drove me to major in Computer Science in college and later volunteer as a Computer Science mentor for Hawaii Science Fairs as a way of “giving back” to the things that lead me to where I am today. I’ve definitely made a huge improvement as a programmer since high school.

If you want to learn more about this project and my humble beginnings as a programmer without any formal Computer Science education and bad code, please check out the Github repo below!

Source: PIPE