Markus Roberts Email & Phone Number

FGCS Gizmotics club is an experimental program to expose elementary school children to the fundamentals of engineering by leading them to problems that require an engineering mindset to solve, and then discussing the structure of the problems with them without providing answers.It is very hands on, with an aversion to pre-packaged solutions (no Lego allowed). Think "Junkyard Wars" on a table top with materials from the recycle bin and hardware store. We also have an annual group project that uses more advanced material (e.g. integrated circuits) and more adult guidance; most recently, we build a 3d printer.

FGCS Math club is an experimental program to expose elementary school children to college level mathematics as opposed to teaching them to be pocket-calculators. In the spirit of Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament" the goal is to teach them to see the beauty of thinking like a mathematician first, and fill in the details later. Each school year we try to tackle at least one interesting problem for which we can find no published solution, and post our results if successful. Most recently, we added a term to a series in the OEIS.

reality.com is a small partnership formed to hold various assets which occasionally get assembled like tinker toys to form businesses, contribute to charitable causes, or perpetrate elaborate practical jokes.Our main project at this point is opening a small used book store / coffee shop, though it isn't yet clear which of the above categories it will fall into.

I've contributed to numerous open source projects over the years.

Led a skunk-works team developing a multi-tired front end to various corporate databases (HR, Finance, etc.) providing a unified view of HR / departmental data by reconciling disparate models of the corporate structure through creative data mining and brute tenacity.

Tier3 had a small render farm (inconsequential by today's standards, but we loved it like the bastard child it was), a network of workstations, a Novel file server, a mail portal, etc. and I kept them dusted, added machines, added ram, replaced power supplies and motherboards, performed exorcisms when needed, and so on.