February 22

Genius Hour Reflection Post #2 (I’m so original)

Genius Hour

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My Genius Hour Project #2

I posted a while ago a reflection on my first genius hour project, and this is pretty much the same but for my second project.

My topic was coding and video games, I wanted to learn unity and make a video game, or at least a level of it. The idea was to make a game where the player could pilot a nano-ship and they would have to blast the harmful bacteria inside a human’s body to cure them. Though making the game is not as easy of a task as I thought it would be. I still liked what I was doing though, and that’s why I chose to do this for my Genius Hour, because I love playing games and i felt like learning and trying to make games, to make my own creation that people could play. And I have to say, I learned a lot.

To even start making a game I had to learn Unity, I used sites like Codecademy and Codecombat to learn coding, and used Blender, which I already learned to use in my previous Genius Hour project to make the models for the assets in my game. Then I had to watch a bunch of tutorials just to understand the Unity layout, and a bunch more to learn how to add and code assets for the game. All of this gave me quite a lot of knowledge on Unity, but I still have a lot to learn. I also had to learn a bit about bacteria, though not a lot since that is for later stages of the game which I haven’t reached yet, and that’s about all that I learned, much more than I expected to learn if I’m quite honest. All this learning means that I grew as a person, not necessarily in how nice I am or something like that, but because I have earned a lot of knowledge from this project.

Knowledge

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This project is a bit like the other one when it comes to helping the world, it’s not a really impactful thing, but it helps bring awareness on certain diseases (enemies in game) and how to counter them (you get to choose certain pills before a level and if they are useful in real life they help you in game). So that’s how it helps, not much, but its something. On the topic of helping, I have my next Genius Hour project coming up, and this one has to also have a positive impact on the world, and I have decided that I will work on science. By this I mean that I am going to find a certain everyday useful thing, and see if I can improve it through the power of science, like an airbag that deploys quicker, or the plans for a more efficient machine. I don’t really know what I’m getting myself into, or if I will even be able to accomplish anything, but I know that I will find something and like doing it, and that if I am successful, my efforts will have helped other people.

January 20

An image is worth a thousand words #2

No words in between, try to figure out the sentence that these images make, and write your answer down in the comments, good luck. 🙂

Cincinnati: Harambe (1999—2016) Congado  File:Typical internet meme image format.svg

Willard via Compfight          Marcio Erli via Compfight

3rd image:

Barronwebster. Typical internet meme image format. May 13, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. January 20, 2017. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typical_internet_meme_image_format.svg

4th image:

Verch, Marco. NBA 2K16. August 5, 2015. flickr. January 20, 2017. https://www.flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/20314000412/in/photostream/

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January 15

My Twitter Connection Assignment (school related).

So I had this one project for my Digital Citizenship class, that links with my genius hour project.

Post on what genius hour is: click this

It was a 3 part project, so let me summarize it.

The first part involved finding the people that we would talk to, they would be our connections for the rest of the project, so we had to choose wisely. My second project, as I might have mentioned in a previous post, was about making a game that consists of shooting microbes with a spaceship inside of a human body, so as to clean said human from the disease (game still in concept phase).

Anyways, we had to follow at least 10 people, and here are the twitter usernames of the 11 people I followed:

Took a while, but I found all these people and decided that they would be able to help me in my research. All of them are either people specialized in coding (game creators, companies teaching coding etc…) or specialized in medical science (epidemiologists’s, health leaders, etc…).  We then had to create a list (the list I made), and add the people we had subscribed to into it.

Quite simple right? Well we also had to introduce ourselves with a mention tweet pretty much to say that you aren’t a bot. Out of 11, 3 responded, which is fine, as to them it would be like I, a complete stranger, came up to their face, said hello, and started talking.

link

So for the second part of our project we just had to ask our “connections” some questions. They had to be questions related to our project, I asked the coders about unity3d and if I should use it, as well as if they knew about good learning sites for coding. As for the medical scientists, I asked about diseases, such as the most common or deadly ones. This was all so that it would be easier for me to choose and make the levels for my video game. It took some time to make all those questions because of twitter’s limit on characters per tweet. If they responded (which few did) we had to favorite the tweet and respond with a thank you, overall, not the hardest part in the assignment.

 A picture on something related medical science, link.

The last part is actually what I am doing right now, a reflection post on the assignment, not supposed to talk about it though. I have to think back on everything and see what went well and wrong, so here it is:

After all the hard work I got decent results, most of the people I followed did not respond to either my question or my hello tweet, but the few that did were quite helpful and nice. No one followed me back, and I’d say that apart from , who responded to one of my tweets asking for coding sites, no one provided more assistance than I asked for. I do have to say I just left it at that, didn’t really talk back to them, mostly because I am not comfortable with online relationships and want to at least hear their voice before becoming friends with them. And finally, how this might help me in the future, well really, it will help a bit, as now I will know how to get help from professionals on twitter, but I usually use information from sites and books, as it is much easier to use than to talk to a person. So I guess this will help me in he future, but not that much.

Well, that does it, long and messy post, but you have made it to the end, good job and thanks for reading. 🙂

 

October 28

Genius hour, the time I can actually learn what I want in school.

My presentation in video format:

If the video doesn’t work, here is a link of it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9u_Mdnalo

Remember that post I made before about the rocket that I made on Blender, the post is named “I made this”. Well, now I am going to tell you all about my little project, even if you don’t care about it.

Picture of said rocket: screenshot-2016-10-26-at-13-09-24

So, I researched, as I told you before, on how to make a rocket, even if it is simplistic and needs a lot of work on it. I chose this topic because I love rockets, and I am planning on becoming a rocket scientist, or aerospace engineer in the future, though it does take a lot of work to get that job. It also seemed like something cool to do and a good way to start learning blender.

I learned a lot in the time I was working on my project, a few new things on physics and calculus, the basics of blender, and the design, time, construction, and all the factors required to make a reusable rocket that can leave the Earth’s atmosphere and come back down. Personally, this made me feel much more respect for the scientists behind the Apollo 15 and he Falcon 9, since their work is really  hard, it also made me grow as a learner and scientist, since I learned a lot on rocket engineering.

Personally, I would like to say that I helped the world, but until I can actually make a reusable rocket, I won’t really be helping anyone. Though, the closer I get to knowing how to make a rocket, the closer I get to actually helping humanity reach for the stars, so, in a way, I am helping humanity, step by step. I’m planning to make my next project about programming, and making a game that instructs people on diseases, through shooting said diseases in a micro-battleship. This way I can make people more aware of diseases, and maybe even convince some players to give money to charities or do something about those diseases themselves.

From the person who wrights really long posts 🙂