So I know that I am not supposed to just sit here and go on about how much I loved/hated the class, but I have to say it at least once… This class was absolutely awesome!! Dr. Brown is an amazing teacher and your lucky if you have to take this class…. Ok, now that my tangent is over with I will go on to explain why I think the way I do. Within the first week of class I knew that it was going to be a blast. We started off with our first project about Binary. I had heard about it, but frankly did not understand a single thing about why there were all of these 0 and 1′s. I got a little confused with some of the information but by the end I could write it out and understand what numbers it was representing and how I would end up needing to use it in our future projects.
Now I am not trying to just go through and highlight about every project that we did this semester, but hardware was a big thing for me. I started to realize in this week just how much I loved the Hardware aspects of computers. I am going for Programming, but I would think about changing my degree if I didn’t have to start all over again. I liked how with our class that we could use hands on ways to learn about all of the information that was given to us. It never was like in other classes how you have a packet given to you with diagrams and have to memorize it. There were always videos and links to sites and other important resources. The videos were always my favorite though. Especially when we covered software and hacking. I watched probably every video available about Microsoft and Apple, as well as about the history of hacking. Did you know that hacking first started by the use of phones and how to use a prize out of a captain crunch cereal box to make certain pitches to break into the phone lines?? Now there were some less “fun” portions of the class like databases. No my opinion I just don’t like databases so the subject for me was blah. But another fun point of the class was Scratch. I am going for programming so of course I was happy as a kid on Christmas when I was able to make a program for a project. I made a game that was marshins showing you around there world and they even danced!! Now how could that not be fun! But I learned about the next week harder than everyone else. We went over hacking and I learned real fast first hand. I got a virus on my computer that ate up half my hard drive taking my Scratch project with it!! So i definitely became efficient in Scratch. But for hacking, after my episode with my own personal experience, it was really interesting Dr.Brown put up links for this section and he even showed us sites like hackthissite.org that teach you about hacking. It was really cool I went and joined the site and learned a lot of stuff from it. But they never promoted hacking in a negative way! Which made it nice cause I didn’t have to worry about someone trying to hack my computer from the site and it was completely safe. It goes to show that Dr. Brown doesn’t put the links on there to bore the snot out of you they are actually really fun!
Now two other things that stand out the most to me the most out of the class that were important were Robotics and Virtual Reality. With Robotics I learned a lot! We got to build a robot from tiny Lego pieces and program them to follow a black line on a track! I felt so proud after putting all that hard work into it! Don’t laugh though, its not as easy as you would think! Plus with virtual reality we got to play around with a program like Alice or Greenfoot. I chose Alice, because I just despise Java, but I went through and followed the tutorial in Alice and by the end I had a ice skater doing a whole routine with an audience that applauded when she finished and a crazy snow man that would scare off everyone and eat the ice skater!! haha. So needless to say this class teaches you so much about computers and the use of different aspects of the computer world. I know that I use what I have learned in this class every day and will use it while continuing on with this degree. Almost everything now is done by or with computers and I have learned more from this semester in this class than I have in my 3 years of attending classes here. I hope that everyone else has enjoyed this class as much as I did.
Thank goodness, because my programming classes are just piling up with work. At least this class is made to be fun. My other classes its fun, because I love what I’m doing but this class is by far my favorite.
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