As I think back on this semester, this class has been amazing. Things that I never knew, I learned. Things that I wouldn’t even know how to find, Dr. Brown shared. He takes such pride in himself and his teaching. I have truly enjoyed his class and how he gave so much of himself to teach things that could help us in our future, and in such a short amount of time. Very caring and intellegent; one of my favorite professors.
We started the semester coming to grips with who we are and what we will be doing in the semester. We introduces ourselves on our blog and talked about the things that we like and the websites that we like to visit. The Internet is a series of tubes. The next week, we learned about Binary. A series of ones and zeros. Everything is translated into numbers and is stored as numbers and can be used as 0′s and 1′s. We can use switches because of this. Open means one thing and closed means another.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Next, we learned how to build a computer. Dr. Brown allowed us to look inside a broken down computer and see/feel what the inside looks like. He informed us on many tutorials to guide us on building a computer. The components we need and we decided which ones we wanted/customized it ourselves. We did this through a blog, explaining how to build our computer. After that, we learned how to use ALS and understand it. I have also learned a lot about software. I have learned that, second programming language generation assembly languages uses abbreviations to represent binary sequences. Also learned that assemblers convert from assembly languages to machine code.
This semester we also discussed HTML and SQL. I love HTML ever since high school. I am learning, even now, how to create my own websites. In class, we created our own website and uploaded it. It was really neat and refreshed my memory of many html codes. SQL is a type of database. It is a way of using insert, update, delete, and select to locate information within the database by using data manipulation. After html, we played around with Scratch and had to create our own project. I created a dance one, i thought it was pretty neat, but I would to love to go in more detail with Scratch and Alice. They are programs in which you can create animations and tell stories or create games through uploading characters and pictures, and using code that is formatted a certain way. Pretty cool, I thought. After Scratch, we learned computer hacking and played with lego robots. Computer hacking was crazy, because of how easy it is to do. It was interesting when we watched tutorials on how to hack vending machines. With the robots, we learned how to program and build them. We had to make our robot follow a track, and I was excited that mine and my partners worked. Some people didn’t get theres to work. Next, we talked about Artificial Intelligence. It is crazy how games and simulation are bringing technology here. Also, computers can appear intelligent by how they perform. And they are considered intelligent through the languages that they can read. It is crazy how computers read what they are told and they are considered intelligent, when we are the ones that created them and are telling them what to do, but they can be smarter..that’s crazy. Last, we learned about virtual reality/worlds. Games are ridiculous when it comes to virtual worlds. I love Halo, that is the game the pulls me into its world. I think that it is definately a good thing, the way virtual worlds take hold. Also on the other hand, the addicting part I don’t think is healthy.
Dr. Brown’s class was insightful and very real. You know if your here for computers or not after this class. To me, it excited me even more. I want to apply everything I learned and go deeper into detail. His class makes me want to become more knowledgeable in area I never even thought about. I loved this class, and I hope future students gain what I have from it.
