Today we had our first biophysics course. I was much more interested in it than I thought I would be. I have never taken bio before, other than in 7th grade, so I was pretty nervous. However, I ended up remembering most of the terms. We also spent more time on our final projects. I ended up in a group with Rahil and Xavier working on a voice controlled skateboard. One of my original ideas was some type of automated skateboard, so this should be pretty fun for me. However, we do not have a very clear direction of where to go, such as whether it should be made out of all legos or other materials too. Hopefully, we can get a better idea by the end of the week.
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Today we got to have more experience in Python. I think it is much more convenient because you do not need to remember semi-colons, or open and closed brackets. At the same time, you have to pay much closer attention to the indents. Although python seems more convenient because of the syntax, I also have to get used to it. Most of my experience is in Javascript and a little bit of C. So I am used to using semi-colons all the time. However, my older brother has told me that python is very relevant for the future, especially if I go into computer science. Hopefully, by the end of this camp, I will feel much more comfortable with using python.
At first, I was very discouraged to get out of bed and get ready for classes today because my cluster seemed to be the only one not going on a field trip. We also had a two and a half hour robotics lab planned in the morning which can be very frustrating. However, I was able to make the most out of the day and stay optimistic. I was somehow able to get through the robotics tasks very fast today. Within a very short amount of time, I was able to catch up to those that were ahead throughout this whole assignment. That made me much more excited to continue working on the lab activity. The task we spent the most time working on was by far the obstacle course task. Only one course had been made and there was always a line in order to use it for testing, so my friends and I came up with the idea to create our own obstacle course. We measured the real course with my shoes, and then recreated the course as best we could on the tables. Although it definitely was not perfect, it was very useful. Other people even asked us if they could use our course. We were very proud of ourselves for not only coming up with the idea, but also somewhat successfully executing it. Similar to the robotics lab, I was not very excited for the biophysics lab because four hours of coding is a very long time. Luckily, we switched from C to Python today, which I have been looking forward to. Although I do not know very much C, I have been exposed to it before and relatively understand it. Python is completely new to me, and I do not think I have used any language like it before. I remember my brother saying that Python is one of the languages that will be important for the future, so I am very happy that we are starting to learn Python now. Much more happened outside of the classes to make my day much better too. Although I started out the day feeling discouraged, I ended it feeling much more satisfied and optimistic for the future at Cosmos.
I have only had computer science experience in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a tiny bit in C. For this reason, I thought I would be unfamiliar to most of the material and would have trouble understanding it. Surprisingly, the syntax of our programs turned out to be similar to what I know in Javascript, so everything was a lot easier than I expected. We started out slow by doing very simple programs that only have one function. That made it easy to follow along and gain a strong foundation. One thing that I am more unfamiliar with is the fact that C is a compiler language. I have also never used gedit (our text editor) or used LINUX commands when running programs before. Our teachers and the simplicity of the programs make it very easy to catch on and remember all the steps and commands necessary to run code, which was very helpful. At the end of class, we got a much more complicated challenge problem (converting in between base two and base ten) which was much more interesting to try to solve. I ended up finding a way to convert from base ten to base two, however the answer would print backwards. I told one of the teachers and ended up having a one-on-one conversation about the program and this problem which I enjoyed.
Earlier in the day we had also seen the BattleBots lecture. I thought it was very cool to see robots built from real life parts that you can find at hardware stores. Seeing a robot with a flamethrower, which most people only imagine being real, was eye-opening to the possibilities of robots as whole. I understand now that the scope of subjects that robots can be applied to is much wider than I thought it was. I can keep this in mind now when thinking about my final project as well as outside world applications. Although this whole day was filled with learning many new things, the most prominent to me took place during the morning lab period. I was working on one of the tasks (the 4 square task) for the robotics lab, but it was so inconsistent that I could not get it to work whenever I tried to get it checked. I knew that my code was not perfect. The robot was going too fast, so when implementing my code in real life, it was inconsistent. Rather than adjusting the speed to make the robot more consistent, I just tried covered this error by making more adjustments. After what was probably over an hour of working on this task, I decided to finally just go back, lower the speed, and start over. After doing so, my code was much simpler, and it worked right away. This only took about ten minutes. I learned that sometimes it is worth completely starting over, even if it is really discouraging to do so. I also learned that the robot works a lot better and is much more consistent when it goes slow.
At first, I was surprised that there were so many dorms all in the same place and that each building had so many floors. I was also surprised that each floor had its own lounge area with couches and chairs. This is one of the things I really like about these dorms. The fact that we have access to both Campbell and Potter and can use the lounge areas of both is really freeing. Most of the time, there are not many people using the space so you can be alone but outside of your room at the same time. I was able to go through all the floors and find one where the couches were completely empty. So I just FaceTimed my friend without worrying about bothering other people or my roommate.
I think having such a small class makes having a college professor much less intimidating because it’s so intimate. He is able to talk to each of us and interact with us individually, which is useful during labs. I like that he seems to enjoy what he teaching and tries to make it fun for us too. The lab was fun, simply because we were able to physically do something and learn through a hands on experience. I like that we are able to collaborate and talk to the teachers/teaching fellows. However, it would help to come up with a better system for talking to the teaching fellows, just because there are so many students. I was surprised by how much freedom we had, but I think that was really useful to our learning. We were forced to problem solve with our own minds rather than having the whole robot set up and done for us. |