So turns out, university is a very consuming endeavor. As such, I haven’t had much time to write on my blog (:-(). Now, as exams approach, I have decided I need an outlet and should start writing again.

With the personal cruft out of the way, let’s talk about computer science education at modern universities. I’ve seen many people walk into my computer science class thinking it is a joke, and honestly maybe it will be easy for them due to their prior experience. Heck, the most advanced thing we’ve done so far in terms of language constructs is objects pretty much acting as structs (no methods). But what they don’t see is what my class has already taught them: how to design real applications. Yeah, it may be in Processing. Yeah, it may be something you can whip up in minutes, but already we have designed a wandering AI zombie apocalypse simulator, and a visualization of data about foreign student data.

I too was one of these people who thought the class was “too darn slow” and that we should move on. But then I saw the other people in the class struggling with the concept of a class or a loop because they’d never programmed before, and I looked at all we’d accomplished in the class, and I thought that it was, well, pretty damn awesome.

So until tomorrow where I will start afresh with doing my couple of hours of programming a day, here are a couple of screenshots of what we’ve made in our introduction to computer science class.

Simple memory game</img> A simple memory game made for an assignment. Demonstrates classes.

A Zombie Game</img> My zombie apocalypse simulator! In this picture it's in debug mode showing who's following or running away from who. This is my favourite!