COMPUTER SCIENCE FOR ENGINEERS
During my time in the course Computer Science for Engineers
I feel I was able to gain a thorough understanding of some of the challenges
ahead in this master’s program. The first being time management. I am fully
lucky enough to be able to participate in this program without currently having
to work so I’ve been able to use my time fully. Of course I still have some responsibilities
that take time out of the day and I’ve found it’s important to take a bit of
time to decompress, over all though I’ve stayed attentive to my assignments,
studied the material, and kept myself available to follow up on any questions
regarding the work I may have posted on Stack Overflow.
I definitely learned a lot during this course. My prior experience with Java
has been in web development with a JSP framework so when it comes to drawing/painting
graphics in Java that was a very new experience. Additionally, I don’t have an
extensive math background so studying different algorithms in a greater level
of detail was a good experience for me. While this course was challenging it’s
my understanding that we’ll begin to start working with the Unity framework as
the program moves forward. I would imagine that some of the concepts we went
over in this course will become easier as Unity likely has predefined functions
for some of the more complex algorithms and AI. Regardless though I’m glad to
know I now have a better understanding of how those predefined functions work
even if my initial attempts to build those algorithms in vanilla Java weren’t
one hundred percent successful.
Seeing that my capstone project will involve developing my own mobile game a lot of the material I studied in this course will be applicable to that project. Nearly all the coding experience from this course will be valuable moving forward. What was learned here will absolutely need to be applied to future projects. The algorithms both required by the course and those I chose to study will also be helpful moving forward. Because most of the algorithms are applicable to game development this gives me an opportunity to use some of my creative skills to find ways to apply them to my individual game projects.
Matt Martnick's Mastery Journal 