Well, it's the end of the year, and that means that my days in High School are ending soon. In Help Desk, we have been learning about lots of different robotics/ai-related things. One example of this is Amazon Web Services, which has an education program which we have been using to learn about machine learning and how it is used. I think it's really interesting, and even a bit scary how far artificial intelligence has come, being able to, for example, quickly recognize specific human faces and inanimate objects.
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Winter is ending and Spring is beginning, and Quarter 3 is coming to a close. That means there is only a few more months of school left before the end of the year. While that's certainly exciting, it's not that interesting. What is interesting is what we have been doing in Help Desk. I was recently given a Sphero robot, and I spent a decent amount of time rolling it around the house, and also a little bit of time programming it before I returned it to the school, though I didn't really get to have the full experience because I didn't really have time to set up a proper obstacle course. Still, though, it gave me some good insight into how robots work, and some of the possible use-cases for them.
The new year has arrived, but not much has changed. School is still remote for me, and the pandemic is still ongoing. The most interesting thing to happen recently in Help Desk has been CS-Ed week. It was a week where students could visit different "exhibits" ran by other students, to learn about different areas of technology. As for what I have been doing at home, I have been using the Valve Corporation's Source 2 Engine to try my hand at 3D game design for VR. Unfortunately, the full SDK hasn't been released yet, but what has been released is a version with tools to create games/addons based on assets from their flagship title, "Half-Life: Alyx". This actually works out quite well for me, because it gives me access to a huge library of textures, models, and fully scripted objects, meaning I have to do a lot less asset-production and programming, and can focus on what is the most important part to me, the actual game design aspect. So far I have learned a lot about designing 3D environments, and what is good and bad design in a VR game.
With the end of Fall, and the beginning of Winter, not much has changed. School has stayed relatively the same. In Help Desk, we are learning about Amazon Web Services, mostly about the chat-bot aspect of it. Outside of school, another technology-related project I am involved with is a video game that I am creating in my free-time. It is one of the most ambitious games I have created yet, being a top-down shooter with many advanced features that I have not experimented with before, such as an isometric point of view with a z-axis, advanced particle effects, and a custom physics engine.
Fall of 2020 has been defined by Remote-Learning. It has been a very strange start to the school-year, and it has certainly taken some time to adapt. Because I am unable to physically attend class, I was lent a Parrot Mambo drone. I have yet to take the drone outside, and probably won't due to the possibility of losing control of it, and being unable to retrieve it, but it has been fun simply flying the drone around the basement of my house. I also used the drone in my Video Tutorial assignment, which detailed how to take and export photos with the drone.
The last weeks in my life have been very uneventful. Because of the quarantine I unfortunately have almost nothing to talk about. There has really only been one way I have been using technology for learning, and that is Google Classroom. The quarantine has proven to be a real test of the software's stability and quality as many many schools turn towards it to replace actual schooling during the quarantine. So far It seems to have held up and worked properly.
The last weeks in help desk have mostly been pretty uneventful except for one thing, which is the PAX East field trip. The field trip went pretty well. I learned a a lot about how video games are developed and tested from talking to the people at the booths, like how they select which parts of the games to demo at conventions like the one I went to. I also got to play a lot of games that haven't come out yet, mostly indie games, as the lines for more mainstream triple A games where very long.
The last few weeks in help desk have not been all that eventful but some interesting things still happened. A lot of time was spent preparing things for CS Ed week, a drone course was made and slideshows were created, but unfortunately nobody came, so it was sort of a flop. On a brighter note, I have been working on my Individual Learning Experience, which has been going pretty well. While I have spent a lot of time developing games for fun, they were always pretty unprofessional and badly optimized. The ILE project has been an interesting challenge and I have enjoyed developing the game.
In help desk we have been doing VR and Amazon Web Services. While I was unfortunately absent for most of the days we were doing Amazon Web Services, I was there for the VR, and it was pretty great. We spent some time messing around in VR games on PSVR, which was fun, and using VR apps like Google Earth on the HTC Vive. Overall, It has been an intriguing few weeks in Help Desk, and I am excited to see what can be done with VR in the future.
In the past few weeks in help desk, we have shifted our focus away from tech like drones, 3D printers, and 3D pens, and have been using more software and done more programming, like unity, processing, arduino, and, for me, Yoyo Game Maker. I enjoyed playing with these programs, learning how they work and programming games with them. Overall, I look forward to seeing what technologies we will be using in future lessons, and I wonder what kinds of things I will create with them.
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June 2021
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