For those that are interested in hearing more about my classes and the things I am actually doing in them, keep reading. Otherwise, I promise to have more pictures of food coming. I didn't get one of the AMAZING bread pudding we had for dessert tonight, but if it comes back, I won't forget a picture.
Anyways, my parents are so extremely supportive and wonderful for giving me this opportunity to study at the greatest university on the planet. I am so grateful and thankful and I really am loving the academic opportunities here. I think that a lot of the time school just feels like more fun because its enjoyable, except for when things are actually do...
So I am taking three courses this quarter, PWR (Programming in Writing and Rhetoric with a focus on ideas of conservatism), CS 106A (Programming Methodology or... writing games in java), and Communications 1A (Media Technologies, People, and Society).
I had my first essay (1 of 3) due on yesterday in my PWR class. It was a Rhetorical Analysis paper where we chose any text and analyzed it. I wrote mine on "Baptize Me" from
The Book of Mormon, the Broadway show. I guess I was missing my mom and excited that Albuquerque Public Schools would no longer limit my topics based on how offensive they were. You can find a final copy of my essay
here: (click on the word here or copy and paste the url below into your web browser)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fHQwG3HT8Yn3WForaw-UwU1rhzm3Oj3l86w_4vkg8eA/edit?usp=sharing
For the first couple weeks in CS106A we were programming Karel the Robot. It is an easy and awesome way to learn programming. Karel's world looks a little bit like this:
After that we started learning java. We wrote many programs to draw things like targets (in my program I made it so that you could throw darts at it) and boxes and then also to compute things like the range of a list of numbers or the Pythagorean theorem. We did one that created a pyramid of bricks. I extended my program so that the pyramid was colorful and the bricks change color continuously (Thanks Brian!). So you can't see the animation, but it kinda looks like this:
Now we are working on building the Breakout game. I am in the middle of writing it.. but it looks something like this:
If anyone has any ideas for good extensions for this game... let me know :)
Finally, Communications is mainly about the lectures and the readings. A lot of the stuff I am learning is pretty upsetting. For instance: for the first time ever there is a decrease number of applications for driver's licenses because people no longer think they need to leave the house because they feel like they can connect through the computer. It is difficult to find ways to mobilize society because everything is so personalized. Most teenagers are heavy multi taskers (when they use a media device they are usually using three to four different ones at a time) which actually damages the brain making you worse at multi tasking and less able to focus. And there are many more. Some other interesting things include: twitter is predicting elections better than polling, PowerPoint is limiting the performance of a presentation, and dogs can now tweet using a device on their collar. I am forgetting a lot of the other things that have been so mind blowing and interesting. The great part about communications is that it is so relevant to the modern world. Everyone uses these technologies many times a day. Within months new fads with social media and communication spring up and old ones die out.
My passion for the material I am learning in communications might lead me to doing research next quarter with a communications professor. I talked with my professor during office hours about some of the research he might be doing next quarter with multi tasking that I might be able to help out with. In the class part of our grade is actually participating as subjects in some of the experiments performed on campus for communications. I can't disclose what experiments I have already done but they were pretty cool.
Anyway, more on academics later.....
