Scientific Visualization has been a very interesting class so far this year. I knew we wouldn't solely be doing game things this year, since that will come in later years, but I didn't exactly know what to expect. So far it's been more challenging than my math class, but easier than some other courses too. However, since it's a class I really care about, I've made it a bit harder on myself at times because I can be a perfectionist. However, Sci-Vis has really helped with that.
After our assignment to make a game about careers in scientific visualization, I realized that the assignment had taught me a valuable lesson. I had stayed up really late each night of the project, and by the end I was still unhappy because of the lack of continuity in card format, the information I felt we were missing, and flaws that I thought would make the game unplayable (we didn't have enough time to test it out). We got to play other peer-made games in class though, and I realized that at least comparatively, ours wasn't too bad. The effort my group had put into our game was apparent, and I felt a bit better. Still, when I looked at my grade, I feared the worst. Instead I was surprised to find an A on the project. Mr. B had said he wasn't looking for perfection, but I hadn't expected that what we had done had made the cut. I realized that I had done well enough on the parts of the game I had gotten done, and that if I hadn't spent so long perfecting every little thing, we could have tested and fixed up our game. As the saying goes "Don't miss the forest for the trees." Since that project I've had much better prioritizing skills when working on projects, and I know I can go back and fix the rest if I have time. Time management is probably the most useful thing that I've learned so far from this class, though not necessarily an intended lesson, it applies to all of my other classes and aspirations, and will be useful throughout the rest of my life. I am incredibly excited for the rest of the year, even though I know it will continue to be more and more challenging. I am excited to get into the more creative part of the course. I have been interested in animation for a while because I really like cartoons, but I imagine it is going to be hard. Just learning how to do better digital art of any sort will make me really happy because I have a lot of friend's whose skills greatly surpass mine. I would love to be able to make cool art too. But whatever we learn next, I'm sure that it will be great.
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Energy is a bigger problem in first world countries than third world countries, but in most places some form of energy is being used. It would be wonderful to get reliable sources of energy to anywhere in the world so that people could access the internet for education, have heating or cooling, and even just having electric lights in their homes so they can stay up later if they wish. However, it is no secret that the main source of our energy, fossil fuels, are not very renewable resources. If we want to continue having power for our homes, cars, and anything else, we need to find a more efficient source of energy than dead dinosaurs. However, new research suggests that running out of fossil fuels isn't what's going to undo us in the end. This graph shows how the US production of oil and natural gas has not greatly affected the remaining amount of those resources. There is enough of each left that we aren't that close to running out of it. However, there are still ill-effects. The emissions from all of the fuels have caused a great deal of climate change. Since there isn't as much pressure on changing to other fuels since there is still a good amount of ancient materials, not much is being done to stop using fossil fuels. Any change will be driven by the need to stop global warming rather than lack of fossil fuels. While we all are aware of the impending doom climate change could bring (flooding, extinction of many organisms, lack of oxygen, etc.) not much is being done about it. The US's energy consumption is only growing, and clean sources of energy are not used very much. Most clean energy sources are deemed too expensive, or impractical. Solar panels are very costly, and not everyone has the space to put a wind turbine up in their yard. To solve this problem, finding a cheaper, cleaner source of energy would be crucial. This would require further knowledge of why clean energy sources are so expensive (cost of materials, and how energy companies that would lose money to the clean sources play into this). Also, to create this clean energy, knowing engineering could greatly help. It could allow you to find more efficient ways to make solar panels that cost less and collect more energy. Personally to solve this problem, I could try to get the school to invest in solar panels. Even just using the SensorTag (if I had access to the roof) I could conduct an experiment to see if it would be worth it for the school to put up the panels. I would need to know how much sunlight solar panels need to produce a certain amount of energy, the cost per panel, as well as the school's total energy consumption, and area of the roof. With this knowledge I could conduct an experiment with the hypothesis "If the school invests in solar panels, then they will burn less fossil fuels, and in the long run, save money." The independent variable would be how much sunlight hits the roof throughout the day, and the dependent variable would be how much energy the school would make from said sunlight, and how much money they could cut off of the energy bill. It would be important to pay attention to how much the panels would cost, because you wouldn't want the school to be in debt because of solar panels. This could give the clean source of energy a bad reputation, even though it is likely the school would be paid back in the amount they saved on energy because of the panels. While clean energy should be used regardless of the cost because of how beneficial it is, people have their best interests in mind. The money aspect of the above experiment is more so to convince the school to install solar panels than to gain profit. The school has tons of lights that seem to constantly be on (I've seen the school at around 7pm on a Saturday while driving by and most of the buildings were lit up like Christmas despite most likely being empty). The amount of energy used must be huge, and although it is being used for tons of people at once and more efficient than everyone having their own lights (sort of like carpooling) we could be even more ecofriendly by using solar power. Sources:
Succeed and fail, two of the most common words used in guidance counselor talks, rants of angry parents, to describe businesses, and in terms of life in general. From the time we are very small, fear of failure is instilled in us, and despite many attempts to say mistakes useful for learning, the message doesn't get across to most people. Mistakes don't always look very good on a resume.
At my age, I don't think I can yet quite define whether or not I am successful. While I do have a picture of success, being happy and making an effort to improve and be a good person, I have a feeling that overtime this image will become a bit different. Technically, I am successful since I try my best at pretty much everything and am fairly happy for the most part. I make good grades, but succeeding in life and in school feel like two very different things to me. Failure is very important as well. I don't tend to handle failure very well, and will try to avoid it for the most part, but it also depends on the degree of failure. In school, a bad grade isn't the end of the world as long as I learn something from it and try to correct the mistake. The threat of failure pushes me to try harder. Failure is only useful if you take advantage of it. Many times while sketching for fun, I stop halfway through and abandon drawings, believing they are inadequate and that I can not fix them. While this is small scale failure, it does say something about me. If I think something is going to fail, I am likely to give up on it in some cases. In other cases however, always failing has made me better at not giving up. Writing had often been like sketching for me: I'd start and give up early on. I had so many scrapped beginnings of stories that one day I decided I was actually going to plan an entire novel out. While the story it is becoming has strayed incredibly far from the original concept, and I only work on it sporadically, I have still not given up on that story because I want to have one success out of all of the failed beginnings I have created and I believe I can finish it. In the future, as more successes and failures come I am sure that my entire perspective will greatly shift. Ten years from now I will have probably finished school and be out in the world doing something or another to try to support myself. Success at that point would be to be either in a profession I love, or on track to get there, and probably still being a kind and happy person in general. I would love to go into some sort of artistic field, whether it is writing, story boarding, game designing, acting, or something else entirely. However, maybe I'll find another job that I'd like even more and have art as a hobby. Whatever I do, I will need to get experience/ training for it, and most likely a college degree as well. I'll have to find an occupation that I have a passion for, and think about what school and activities will best help me reach that job. Before any of that, I'll have to survive the rest of high school, getting good enough grades and doing enough extra-curricular activities so that I can get into a good school and get a job that I like. Part of the plan is to make a more through plan for the next few years as I start to decide what I really want to invest myself in. Mostly, I just want to make sure that in ten years I am a better person than I am today. If I can accomplish that, I think I can consider myself successful. For the past week or so in Scientific Visualization, in keeping with our data unit, we have been preparing to experiment, and we have gotten to test out the TI Sensor Tag. The tag seemed really cool, and I was excited to try it out. My group and I went around the classroom, mainly testing out the light sensor using the heat lamps from the pet lizard’s cage, and looking at different temperatures of people’s faces and the lights. However, I was sort of underwhelmed with the sensor. I didn't feel like it was as capable as it had been described.The graphs were inconsistent since the changes were so large, and it was difficult to compare data based off of just the graph. Looking at the numbers was pretty interesting, but I am glad that we only had a short time for initial testing or else I would have gotten bored very quickly.
We’re going to have to conduct an experiment around campus using the tags, but we get to choose what we would like to collect data on. Some basic experiments involve collecting temperature, humidity, and light readings from different rooms and comparing them. Based on the standards the school wants, this could help them to determine which classrooms most direly needed their thermostat adjusted or fixed, or which light bulbs should be replaced. Combining a few factors in an experiment could serve as fuel for a more complex experiment. Comparing how the light and humidity levels in different classrooms affect heat for instance could also help the school determine what improvements could be made to upkeep and ideal temperature. Though impractical because of location, if we were to put a sensor on the roof, we could even see if solar panels would be a good investment for the school. The motion sensor could be used in experiments, but will likely be less useful for helping the school, and would more likely be frivolous. However, things as easy as comparing the temperature of benches around the school to the amount of shade in the area (or the light level) could aid the school by helping them decide where to place benches so that they aren’t too hot or cold to sit on. (This is sidetracking just a bit.) One experiment that is impractical, but would be fun is to see how many times other group members would press the button on the sensor. Since the data is tracked, if you were to also keep track of what location you were in, you could see how they correlated. It would be more of a just for fun experiment, possibly a psychology experiment, but would not help the school. The only way I could think that it might is if the button pressing was restlessness, then you could see in which places students were less focused. Otherwise, the experiment is pretty much useless. It would have to be done under false pretenses so that the group members holding the sensor would not know that the number of times that they pressed the button were being recorded. You would also have to make sure that the entire group knew that there was a button that they could push that wouldn’t turn the sensor off. However, this also could go wrong if someone hit the power button by accident during the experiment if they got into the habit of pressing the button when they were bored, just because it was there. Also, if the group avoided pressing the button, you wouldn’t have any concrete data to work with. (Slight sidetrack over.) There are other experiments that could be conducted, but would require extra data collection besides just what the Sensor Tag would gather. For instance, to see whether or not humidity increases with more people in a classroom would require measuring humidity with the sensor, as well as taking a head count. While this wouldn’t be too incredibly difficult, if we were to compare humidity to the size of a classroom, doing the manual calculations for floor space may be more time consuming. This is one example of how the tag’s capabilities could limit what experiments we could conduct. Another limitation is the software forcing to cooperate. When using the sensors for the first time, we had at least five in use at once trying to connect. It was difficult to determine which tag was which when connecting, as they are named in numbers and their name is not indicated on the tag (as far as I could tell). Some people’s phones wouldn’t connect, or the app wouldn’t open at all. Once I got the tag connected, the motion sensor still didn’t want to work, and we are unable to use the microphone. It felt as if all I could monitor was light, temperature of either the room or objects, humidity, pressure, and whether or not someone was pressing a button. While this is a wide variety of sensors, it is only about half of the ones that were mentioned. I did not notice whether or not the magnetic sensors were working, so my options may be a bit broader than I originally expected. The biggest limitation currently is that the app does not store the data anywhere. While it is cool to watch the line graph go up and down, without a way to record data, it is not very useful. I am not sure how we are going to overcome this obstacle. For some experiments, simply writing down a number with pen and paper might be fine, but in others the data will change too rapidly and the trend will be too important for this to be practical. Also, trying to record multiple variables at once could serve as another problem with written data. I have a feeling there is a way to export the data as you collect it, or to connect the device to a different machine that can record it, but if there is we have not been told about it. If there isn’t, this will further limit the possibilities for experiments, since the best option would be to write things down. Hopefully there will be an easy way to record data so that we are able to do interesting experiments, and come to some sort of conclusion from them. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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