Today I had my first day of labs. Dear any first year student: Get acquainted with programming before you come to university… Six hours straight of learning how to program is NOT fun!!! This post might have a lot of typos…my brain is fried…. sorry.
9:30-12:30 Computer Science 110
12:30-1:30 Physics Tutorial
2:00-5:00 Physics lab
The day started off wonderfully but by the end of it my enthusiastic attitude had disappeared into thin air. The Computer Science lab went well. I knew what I was doing, finished my lab early and decided to make use of the extra time that I had left over to do what? Experiment! I thought: “Programming seems like so much fun!” “I understand this!” ” I love this course!”
Straight after that I rushed to my Physics tutorial, which I loved as well. We got to discuss a whole bunch of conceptual questions and draw diagrams on blackboards e.t.c.
After the tutorial I had half an hour to eat lunch and then a Physics lab. However in this lab we a)had a diagnostic test b) learnt to program for another 2.5 hours. Somewhere in those three hours my brain gave up on me. “Learning how to program” in a new, confusing languagewas not fun…. (DrRacket vs. vPython; DrRacket wins in friendliness, vPython wins in what you can do, but vPython makes you want to rip your computer apart). We made a ball bouncing off walls program which was a neat, but a harrowing experience. After finally emerging from the lab in a completely zombified state I couldn’t decide if spending all those hours on virtuality were meaningful or meaningless. I mean technically a virtual world is not real, right? But if we are expected to spend time in them, do they become more real? What actually makes something real? Is a story in a book real? Technically it is printed on paper, it carries someone’s thoughts. Is it the sum of the connotations that makes things more real? Does a real thing have to have mass or does it just have to have enough connections with other things to be defined as real? Why do we spend so much time learning about things that are solitary? Why do we spend so much time learning about things that might not even exist?… Yes, brain is fried.