UNM Engineering Open House

As part of my scholarship obligations with the Computer Science department, I am required to attend the departments open house where high school students come and get information about our school. This is my second year attending this event. The event is not the most exciting thing in the world, it is nice to meet young students who are interested in math, engineering, and science. Also, there was free food!

One thing that disturbed me was how few students seemed as though they were there of their own accord. Almost every student who I talked with seemed to be prisoner escorts of their parents. The students did not seem very interested in what was going on and their parents seemed to be thrusting it upon them. Of course, not all the students were this way. Perhaps if the "attractions" for the Computer Science department had been more engaging we would have felt more excitement from the future students.

There were two attractions this year. The Art Research and Technology (ARTS) lab and a small presentation by three Ph.D students. The ARTS lab was actually very cool. Joe Kniss showed off his dome. This dome is raised off the ground with rocking seats beneath and six projectors to produce a seamless image that covers your entire range of vision. The image being projected is that of Saturn's asteroid belt. In the very center of the dome is a pad that you can stand on and control your trajectory through the asteroids. Also, a Wii remote is used to "shoot" the asteroids so you don't smash into them and "die". A very cool demo indeed.

Joe Kniss on Daily Planet: http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/september-2011/daily-planet---september-06-2011/#clip527472

Joe Kniss is a great talker and is very good at explaining things in terms that an intelligent high school sophomore can understand. Unfortunately, his demo is quickly forgotten when he tells you that the "real" excitement is around the corner where the Electrical Engineering Senior Design Team is building a robot. Three students stand huddled around an unfinished "junk bot" as they call it. The bot is supposed to be able to calibrate the positions for the project for Joe Kniss' dome. However, the students are unable to adequately engage their audience who quickly becomes bored and awkwardly waits for something exciting to happen. Each time I gave a tour of the ARTS lab I became less and less impressed with the senior design project.

Overall, it was not a bad open house. However, I wish we had a better way to engage students at these things.

I am disappoint

I am disappointed that my CS 341 class has turned into a dud class. I was really excited to take this class because it is all about low level computer architecture. The professor is actually a great lecturer... However, he is way lenient on homework assignments and class pace.

Today, we were assigned our final programming assignment, an optimization assignment. We have to take a program that does some image manipulations and make it faster. This in itself is a really neat assignment. Unfortunately, we finished the section on optimization a few weeks ago and are now learning about how we could potentially write our own shell.

In the past, students have told me they actually had an assignment to write a shell. I really wanted to do this in this class. It's not that I can't do this on my own, it is just disappointing that the class is so slow and for me, quite boring. I was really hoping I would be challenged in this class. Unfortunately, I have been able to finish each assignment the day it was assigned.

Again, the professor is actually a great lecturer... I just wish the class pushed me a little harder.