It's been almost a year since I last posted. I guess self-reflection isn't easy to do when you're constantly up to your neck in assignments and group work.
Third year has been tough. Massive learning curves were dealt with, deadlines were relatively short, and ambiguity was, as always, at the core of coursework description. However, this year has not been as difficult as I expected it to be, nor has it given me a constant stream of melancholy as second year did. Now that I think about it - I really did enjoy this year!
Subjects have been much more engaging, where I have been able to delve into topics of neuroscience, computer graphics, and was part of a video game development team with friends on my course, which I am particularly proud of. The game's called LanWars: Sheriffs vs. Bandits, and the main twist is that you can move your character off the edge of one screen and continue on the adjacent machine, in a 2.5D western-themed game of team-based control points. At the start of the year I was given a taste of life outside Computer Science by taking up an open module called 'Education, Schooling, and Diversity', which I found really interesting, and even found out some things about my hometown's policies. Come to think of it, Newham does produce some pretty successful educationalists, a few from my own school - Michael Wilshaw for instance (however questionable OFSTED's policies may be).
Now that I have a better idea of what sort of topics I am looking for in a career (education at the core), I feel as if I'm now beginning to open myself back up to software development, as I have become much more comfortable with creating a software product, and can say at this moment that I wouldn't mind working for a video games company sometime in the future. This is not because I know every little detail about how a real-world company works, but because I can understand the enjoyment, excitement, and sense of satisfaction that is gained from producing a piece of software, and observing people's enjoyment from something you have created is a truly awesome feeling. I also know this because I found that I don't necessarily have to deal with the fundamental, nitty-gritty details of a system setup - my speciality seems to be with visuals and user experience. I don't mind writing hundreds of lines of code, but I prefer to show my visually-creative side as well as my technically-creative one.
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| Me sporting the LanWars attire. No, I don't always wear a cowboy hat. |
This year I have also helped out at three education-related events down at the local science and learning centre - @Bristol. The events are hosted by an organisation called DigiMakers, which is managed by the lovely Caroline Higgins at the Computer Science Department. I'd have loved to attend more of them, but coursework pressures were getting pretty tight for me around February/March. I started off by helping visitors (mainly children) get started with setting up a Raspberry Pi computer, and guiding them through various worksheets in order to explore the tip of the iceberg in terms of useful things you can do with it. I loved everyone's enthusiasm, and it seemed to be really good practise for being a teaching professional - I often got thrown into situations where I had to deal with a group of 5 kids and attend to them, while juggling other people and explaining concepts on-the-fly. After a lot of demand, at subsequent DigiMakers events I presented a Scratch workshop along with Hannah, the lovely outreach officer for the Computer Science Society. This went really well, and although I would have liked to put less weight on learning from the walkthrough-style worksheets, I found that teachers were coming into the workshop and using them as resources for their classes. I might be sounding cheesy and lame, but it really was amazing to see a room filled with families of people aged 4 to 74, each eagerly learning how to make a simple 2D game of a dog chasing a cat, or a 2-player projectile-based game. Of course, there are other things happening at the event, such as workshops for learning how to program in Python, workshops for learning how to create your own wearable electronic devices, and companies showcasing technical devices like Occulus Rifts and Motion-Sensitive robots. If you're about in Bristol and a DigiMakers event is on, I strongly recommend going - plus it's free entry!! Free!!
The other big thing going for me this year is my summer placement. Having a reasonable financial cushion to protect me, I felt it was the right time to combine my two great passions - education and travelling - and apply to be a Camp Counsellor at a summer camp in the US. It only took a week for a camp to contact me after my application was approved, and after a brief but pleasant Skype interview, I was hired! It's a science camp in north-eastern Pennsylvania, and is the kind of place I would have dreamed of going to as a kid - I never knew summer camps catered for nerdy kids like me! I mean, they've got stuff like archery and canoeing too, but to have sessions like rocketry, robotics, 3D modelling, animation, along with practical physics, biology, chemistry and more, it's making my inner child bounce around with so much excitement I don't know how I'll contain it. I don't think I've been this excited since I was 10. Of course, I'll be looking after a group of kids and leading or assisting in some sessions myself, and will no doubt be thinking hard about whether or not I'd like working around kids as a career. Oh, and I've never been to the US before. Oh man, so excited.
Oh and also I've recently been working on my personal website, hosted by the department. This is what I'm paying Uni fees for, right? http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~np1970/
I had quite a bit to talk about, so congrats for making it this far though the post :)
It's been a good year, and I'm sure I'll have an awesome summer.
Until next time.
