About Me

About Me

Hello! My name is Braden and I've been leading a team of programmers for

5 years

, both as a Technical Lead and a Senior Game-Play Programmer. I am a husband, published researcher, leader, developer, mentor, and gamer.

I have been developing video games, web sites, and other software for

almost 12 years

. I obtained Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science, and am currently pursuing a PhD.

Resume

Technical Lead

Oct 2019 - Current

K20 Center

As a Technical Lead for the Game-Based Learning team at the K20 Center, I manage a team of Gameplay Programmers and Web Developers tasked with the creation of educational games and interactive web apps. Aside from giving direction and mentoring, I plan project roadmaps, perform risk assessments, and promote proper communications across teams to ensure that development progresses with everyone on the same page. Additionally, I serve on various committees, setting up and maintaining project management software Center-wide, ensuring secure practices, performing routine server updates and audits, and organizing tech for the Center's annual ILI conference, among other responsibilites.

Senior Gameplay Programmer

May 2019 - Oct 2019

K20 Center

As a Senior Gameplay programmer, I led game development efforts for the Game-Based Learning team. Here I began acquiring leadership skills, learning how to support junior devs, organizing sprints and tasks, and keeping the programming team on-track.

Graduate Student Programmer

May 2017 - May 2019

K20 Center

As a Graduate Student Programmer, I began acquiring technical skills after the existing Technical Lead took their leave. I quickly learned how to securely manage servers: from installing them in the rack to loading operating systems, web servers, databases, and developing the websites and services they would ultimately host.

Software Development Intern

May 2017 - Aug 2017

AT&T

As a software development intern at AT&T, I tried to make the most of my time by learning about the company and industry. I worked on three different development teams in parallel, developing web services for the Salvation Army, extensions to an internal company network building app, and a tracking system and sentiment analysis dashboard rating communications with an internally-utilized chatbot.

Student Programmer

Oct 2014 - May 2017

K20 Center

Throughout my undergrad, I worked as a student providing programming and development support as well as Quality Assurance testing, test plan development, and bug filing.

Skills

Web and Game Development

Node

React

Unity

Unreal

Vue

Adonis

Angular

Symphony

Laravel

Templating Engines

Maya

Server and Database

Linux

Windows Server

NGINX

Apache

PostgreSQL

MySQL

SQLite

VMWare

Docker

Vagrant

AWS

Google Cloud

Productivity, Source Control, Media

Agile

Scrum

Jira

Git

SVN

Axosoft

Trello

Office

Adobe XD

FFMPEG

Balsamiq

Photoshop

Audacity

Audition

After Effects

Programming Languages

Javascript

Typescript

PHP

C++

Python

SQL

Java

HTML

CSS

Bash/Shell

Research and Focuses

Visualization

Data Analytics

Machine Learning

Neural Networks

HCI

Education

PhD, Computer Science

In progress

University of Oklahoma

MS, Computer Science

May 2019

University of Oklahoma

BS, Computer Science

May 2017

University of Oklahoma

Professional Works and Projects

Games and Apps

Get A Life

K20 Center

Students are in charge as they help their character “get a life” in this 10-15 minute, narrative-driven college and career readiness game. Get A Life is a playful way for students to learn about the cost of college, the education requirements of careers, how education can affect income, and how to deal with debt and other setbacks.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Operation: ELECT

K20 Center

Operation: ELECT is a strategic social studies game of politics, press, and the election process. As a campaign manager, you'll compute your way through five levels of government elections and help your candidate secure their spot in the history books.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

K20 START

K20 Center

K20 START is an augmented reality application that reimagines campus tours for prospective students. START is available for both Android and iOS devices. By using the app on a college campus, students can use the interactive map and learn about various points of interest and amenities of the campus, delivered from speakers in a 360-degree photosphere environments.

Download from the App Store or Play Store

AWARE

K20 Center

Students must be weather aware and prepare their town against various natural disasters, such as tornados, hail, floods, and wildfires. All the weather events in AWARE are based on real storms, with real weather maps and meteorological technologies. Students will learn about STEM careers, and emergency management.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Potions!

K20 Center

Potions! is a puzzle game designed to improve the understanding of hypothesis testing. Over the course of five studies, players must conduct controlled trials of the various potions at their disposal, choosing the populations to test them on, setting sample sizes, and making hypotheses to determine which potions can cure which creatures.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Functions of the Machine

K20 Center

Functions of the Machine builds covariational, proportional, and graphical reasoning through dynamic visualizations and adaptive feedback. Each machine is a puzzle and each puzzle is more difficult than the last, challenging students and increasing their mathematical reasoning skills as they progress.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Deadly Distribution

K20 Center

Deadly Distribution covers the central limit theorem and related concepts with an emphasis on the tradeoffs required by statistical sampling and the need to balance sample size, variance, and cost. Only by balancing these factors and being mindful of the data can the student contain the deadly disease and save the population.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Paper Trail

K20 Center

Paper Trail is a point-and-click adventure game designed to lead the player through an interactive ethics case study. Players explore a morally tenuous business environment and come to know their own ethical frameworks along the way as a consequentialist, deontologist, or virtue theorist.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Veritas

K20 Center

VERITAS is a serious game to teach deception detection. Players conduct two interactive, live-action video interviews, determining what, if anything, the interviewees are trying to hide. Through VERITAS, players learn which verbal and physical cues are reliable indicators of truth or deception, and which are merely unreliable stereotypes.

Play on the K20 Game Portal

Swing Striker

Giant Fox Studios

Swing Striker is a fast-paced intergalactic soccer game. It features over-network physics, cross-platform multiplayer, and singleplayer campaign modes. My contributions to this project include bug fixes, development of multiplayer selection, and general organization of existing components into a more workable environment.

Find on Steam

Web Development

K20 Game Portal

K20 Center

The K20 Game Portal has serviced tens of thousands of students and hundreds of schools around the world. It hosts all of K20's educational games, giving teachers the ability to manage their classes, assign games, and view progress tables of their students' work. It also connects them with other resources through K20's LEARN platform. I oversaw this development of this project, which includes many improvements over the previous iteration of the Game Portal, which I had manageed for years.

K20 START Web Portal

K20 Center

Accompanying the START mobile application, I developed a web portal so that content creators could upload the necessary assets, including banner images, 360 background images, and video files of the speakers. Content can be inserted into this portal and speakers can be placed in the 360-degree image environments. The portal also includes in depth analytics that reveal the number of users touring different colleges, the hot spots on campuses, and the mobile operating systems in use.

K20 QUEST

K20 Center

K20 QUEST is a web application intended to provide information to families and students about how to prepare for college. The web site features a content portal for the creation of learning modules, as well as a simple way for families to progress through the content and monitor their progress.

Interactive Science Assessment

K20 Center

I lead development efforts and was the sole programmer on 6 Science Assessment applications as well as the portal hosting them. Unlike most K20 educational games, these simulations allowed for free response questions amidst the interactions, which could be reviewed and scored by teachers after the fact.

Digital Instructional Strategies

K20 Center

There are 20 Digital Instructional Strategies that were developed and hosted on their own portal. While I did not participate in most of the actual coding of this project, I oversaw its development and managed the development of the host site and its apps.

bradenroper.com

K20 Center

This Resume website was developed using NextJS and Tailwind for styling. It's fairly basic, but is developed from scratch on a virtual machine that also hosts subdomains for some of my research projects. Try printing it to see special styling take action, turning the website itself turn into a formatted Resume.

Research

Vis-SPLIT: Visual Classification

The University of Oklahoma

Vis-SPLIT is a Visualization system that allows biomedical researchers to explore the genetic signatures and classify corresponding variants of breast cancer. As the primary author and developer, I was proud to introduce this system and accompanying paper at the 2023 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics conference in Melbourne, Australia. The acceptance rate for papers this year was 33.7%

Check out the Conference Preview, or read on IEEE Xplore or Arxiv

Machine Learning Audio Classification

The University of Oklahoma

During my graduate work, I developed and trained a Machine Learning model to classify audio files. This was a neural network that was carefully tuned and trained on audio from the hit sitcom, Seinfeld. In addition to the ML work, this project required certain decoding expertise to slice and convert video and extract audio based on closed captioning timestamps.

E-commerce Data Analysis

The University of Oklahoma

Over the course of a few graduate projects, I developed multiple systems directed towards analyzing and visualizing e-commerce data from eBay and Amazon. Analysis methods identified trends and anomalies while visualizaiton methods were used to generate connected graphs revealing the purchasing patterns that connected various merchandise.