The second day at COSMOS was the first day of classes. After getting ready in the water pressure lacking bathroom, I headed downstairs and met with my cluster. We walked to the DC where we ate another awesome meal and then headed to one of the science buildings.
Our first class was Biophysics, and we learned a little bit about what the class would be focusing on. Essentially we were going to learn about the physics and statistics involved in biology, using programs that we would learn to compose in C to aid us. Since I have interests in all of those regions I was pretty excited.
Next we went up a floor to a classroom to get the lowdown on our other class, Robotics. We were treated to an in depth, if lengthy, slide-show about the history of computers, and then we were introduced to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots that we would be working with. For those of you who don't know, not only am I a ridiculously big fan of LEGO, I also have worked with Mindstorms when I was younger. But one thing I had always wanted to do was program them without a GUI to help me, which is just what we were going to do.
The last individual class we had for the day was a science writing class. I am currently forgetting the names of all of my teachers, but I'll have their names and links to their sites tomorrow. Anyway, the writing class was really more like an introduction to coding html, which we are going to use to make a website in which we'll post our daily activities. If all goes according to plan, this very post along with the others I make to Blogger should end up there, and some of you may be reading it from my site right now. To those readers: it's a pretty nice looking site, am I right?
After class and dinner I rode with one of my roommates KC (not actually spelled like that) to the Rite Aid down the street to pick up a couple of toiletries we had forgot. After thoroughly indulging ourselves in the plethora of aromas offered by Axe, Old Spice, and other various companies. As you can imagine, it was fairly amazing.
That pretty much wrapped up my day. After a little TF2 I was quite ready to sleep.
Our first class was Biophysics, and we learned a little bit about what the class would be focusing on. Essentially we were going to learn about the physics and statistics involved in biology, using programs that we would learn to compose in C to aid us. Since I have interests in all of those regions I was pretty excited.
Next we went up a floor to a classroom to get the lowdown on our other class, Robotics. We were treated to an in depth, if lengthy, slide-show about the history of computers, and then we were introduced to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots that we would be working with. For those of you who don't know, not only am I a ridiculously big fan of LEGO, I also have worked with Mindstorms when I was younger. But one thing I had always wanted to do was program them without a GUI to help me, which is just what we were going to do.
The last individual class we had for the day was a science writing class. I am currently forgetting the names of all of my teachers, but I'll have their names and links to their sites tomorrow. Anyway, the writing class was really more like an introduction to coding html, which we are going to use to make a website in which we'll post our daily activities. If all goes according to plan, this very post along with the others I make to Blogger should end up there, and some of you may be reading it from my site right now. To those readers: it's a pretty nice looking site, am I right?
After class and dinner I rode with one of my roommates KC (not actually spelled like that) to the Rite Aid down the street to pick up a couple of toiletries we had forgot. After thoroughly indulging ourselves in the plethora of aromas offered by Axe, Old Spice, and other various companies. As you can imagine, it was fairly amazing.
That pretty much wrapped up my day. After a little TF2 I was quite ready to sleep.
You compose symphonies in C. You write programs in C.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if this blog is called "COSMOS @ UC Davis 2009", is it necessary to tag every post with "COSMOS, summer, UC Davis"?