Week 1

After a couple months of absence, I am back to writing weekly updates here on Trials and Tribulations of a Lab Tech. The weekly updates will be on my progress in and thoughts concerning my class this semester (Engineering Literacy For the 21^st Century).

            I am excited for this class and expect it to be much more engaging then most of my other lecture-based classes. So far I am enjoying the first scratch project. I have a pretty neat idea about how I can make an interactive advisement for Sustainable Fisheries Foundation (SFF). In essence it will be a game that demonstrates increased fishing intensity over time, and will be ultimately impossible to beat. The message being that everyone losses when fisheries are not managed.

            So far I have found scratch easy to work with and I have been able to do most of animations I had in mind. It is becoming a bit more complex then I had planned, but I’m still having fun with it. There is a timeline included in my advertisement that will have to run a little fast. I suppose I could make it run slower, but I would have to make a lot more sprites, you’ll see what I mean next week. Overall, so far so good!

            Randy Pausch’s last lecture was very inspiring. One of the points he made was that, brick walls are there to stop people who are not willing to try again. Also, on one of his slides was, “The best gold is at the bottom of a barrel of crap.” I found this funny and true. I think that these ideas would definitely give me motivation when I feel overwhelmed or defeated. I liked the entire lecture and his overall optimism; I would suggest this lecture to just about anyone.