in places
Right now, I am not at home. I am at a university for two weeks. It is a programming camp.
Today, which is Monday, is the first day of camp. I have met my roommate, who is from Beijing (how cool!), and also my class, which consists of 100% boys and 100% gamers. Including the instructor. Anyways. I signed up for the java-language run app development class, so I am hoping this will be a lot of fun. Since I already know a lot of Java, it has been a breeze today. Some kids came in not knowing it that well (despite the fact that it was a prerequisite??), so our "review" session went a bit slowly. I sped through the lesson... it was the basics. I hope tomorrow will be more challenging and fun. We still haven't started making an actual app yet.
My teacher, along with my classmates (there are eight of us), are mostly gamers. In fact, all. Except for me. My instructor occasionally calls out break-time, and when that happens, everyone switches their screens and plays TF2 or League or some other game. To be honest, I can't tell the difference between them. I just know what they're called and that they exist.
There are, however, pretty cool people here. For one, there is my roommate from Beijing, who is nice. I have also met some people while I was eating alone at lunch (lmao). I kind of just sat down at a random table and they talked to me. It was pretty cool. We talked about Silicon Valley and some other shows. And programming languages, and what's the best IDE, things like that. I don't quite fit in because I'm not exactly a tech geek (yet! hopefully I can read up on some tech stuff this summer--if I'm going into computer science, I should be some percent tech geek....lmao). It was fun, though.
One thing that really surprised me, however, was the population of girls. Or lack thereof. In a camp with what, about sixty or seventy people, there are about five girls. FIVE. That is terrible female representation. At first, I was astounded, but when I thought some more about it, I realized it wasn't too much to be surprised about. In fact, it's pretty normal, in the computer science area. (Girl power... woo...)
I'm excited to be in this new programming environment. I hope that I learn a lot in these few weeks.
Today, which is Monday, is the first day of camp. I have met my roommate, who is from Beijing (how cool!), and also my class, which consists of 100% boys and 100% gamers. Including the instructor. Anyways. I signed up for the java-language run app development class, so I am hoping this will be a lot of fun. Since I already know a lot of Java, it has been a breeze today. Some kids came in not knowing it that well (despite the fact that it was a prerequisite??), so our "review" session went a bit slowly. I sped through the lesson... it was the basics. I hope tomorrow will be more challenging and fun. We still haven't started making an actual app yet.
My teacher, along with my classmates (there are eight of us), are mostly gamers. In fact, all. Except for me. My instructor occasionally calls out break-time, and when that happens, everyone switches their screens and plays TF2 or League or some other game. To be honest, I can't tell the difference between them. I just know what they're called and that they exist.
There are, however, pretty cool people here. For one, there is my roommate from Beijing, who is nice. I have also met some people while I was eating alone at lunch (lmao). I kind of just sat down at a random table and they talked to me. It was pretty cool. We talked about Silicon Valley and some other shows. And programming languages, and what's the best IDE, things like that. I don't quite fit in because I'm not exactly a tech geek (yet! hopefully I can read up on some tech stuff this summer--if I'm going into computer science, I should be some percent tech geek....lmao). It was fun, though.
One thing that really surprised me, however, was the population of girls. Or lack thereof. In a camp with what, about sixty or seventy people, there are about five girls. FIVE. That is terrible female representation. At first, I was astounded, but when I thought some more about it, I realized it wasn't too much to be surprised about. In fact, it's pretty normal, in the computer science area. (Girl power... woo...)
I'm excited to be in this new programming environment. I hope that I learn a lot in these few weeks.