Week 1:

Residential Life

To begin the week, students were welcomed by the Cosmos Admin and Resident Assistants (RAs) with games and fun activities. After checking into rooms, we were introduced to the other members of our cluster and our personal RAs Roshan and Hannah before breaking off into small stations. The stations included activities ranging from a photo booth, to freeze tag, to Bingo. However, before we all headed to the dorms for the night, we were tasked with a challenge: plan a skit that we would perform on Friday in a competition referred to as Cosmolympics. Stay tuned for the results on that! We worked tireless (and chaotic) hours on rehearsing it this week. 

The Walk: Lucky for us! The walk to the Computer Science building is close to our dorms. That is not to say our journey was not tiring - on the first day, we had to walk up the stairs to our class on the fourth floor of the building! But we were all enthusiastic regardless. With three weeks ahead of us, we are excited to get to know each other better and learn as much as possible!

Cluster Life

Immediately, we were greeted by our lecturer group: Mr. Leo Porter and Mr. Greg Miranda, our computer science professor and lecturer, and Mrs. Monica Bockman, our teacher fellow. After a quick icebreaker game to better learn each others' names, we jumped into finite state machines (FSM) and how many video game mechanics contain different states. Traffic lights are amongst the most basic examples; the lights will be in either red, yellow, or green depending on the conditions of the environment. After the lecture, we were taken into the computer labs to begin our labs, where we were walked through the basics of the Unity Application and introduced to the component-oriented programming style it uses. In our first lab, we built an ant simulation as an introductory

to FMS.  Afterward, we created our first NPC and further explored the idea of FSM, in addition to NavMesh and autonomous navigation. It was also the first lab in which player movement was based on input, not code logic. Lab 3 allowed us to experiment with simple puzzle games to unlock the finish, and it used keyboard inputs to move and turn. Our next two labs for the week expanded on our state knowledge and introduced UIs as a better interface.  On Tuesday, we took a break from the typical CS-related lecture and were introduced to the branches of ethics and morality, preparing us for the final ethics essay at the end of the program.  We partnered up to come up with a prompt for the essay and ended up having a heated debate between two prompts on voting day (Thursday). The debate ended in a close vote of 11:12.  We did not drop the game-designing journey though. Starting from Wednesday, we started building our own adventure games!