Welcome back. Project assignments have been made and my teammate and I are in the beginning phases of creating a Project Plan. While the project is getting off the ground, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about my love affair with computer science. As is the case with many gamers and programmers, my love affair with computer science began with video games.
When I was eight my family was relocating, and we ended up staying in my aunt and uncle’s basement for a little while. My cousin, Robert, and I were the same age but were very different. I liked sports, building forts, exploring, and to be outside as much as I could. He liked books, computers and science experiments. All his trinkets and gadgets bored me. All except for his newly released ATARI 2600. It was kept downstairs, right outside my room, and it called to me. At first, when my cousin would play he would offer to let me play too. I declined, but I was curious. Eventually he quit asking, and my curiosity grew stronger. It sounded cool. It looked cool. But I would rather be outside tromping through the dirt and building forts over playing a game on the tv. Eventually I started waking up in the middle of the night to play it. I quickly became hooked, and my cousin and I eventually became friends. He was the one to teach me what a computer was and what a computer programmer did. That following summer I wrote in my journal, “When I grow up I want to be a PE Teacher and a Computer Programmer”. Its funny to look back on the writings/thoughts of 8-year-old me. But that kid definitely had some strong ideas.
Through the years more video games fed my interest- Packman, frogger, Tron, even pinball machines at the local pizzeria fascinated me. My first exposure to a real computer was in high school. It was 1989 and I was in an advanced math class when my teacher approached me and asked if I might be interested in learning computers. That there weren’t very many girls interested and I could be a leader and draw more people to her computer classes. I agreed and the following quarter I was coding in BASIC and FORTRAN. My first year of college I took a couple more programming classes (some derivatives of BASIC and FORTRAN), but then had to drop out because I was living on my own and couldn’t afford tuition. Nor did I have the discipline to do the hard work. Instead, I spent a lot of time playing Nintendo games and working part-time.
That was almost exactly 30 years ago. I eventually did go back to college, but I pursued an engineering degree because my grandpa was an engineer and told me I couldn’t do it. That was some serious reverse psychology, but it worked. In college I developed the passion for programming / using simulation tools to solve problems. And that is as far as my love affair of computer science took me. Until I started the Online program here at Oregon State University. It is very surreal to me that my 8-year-old self knew, and it took me another 30 years to fulfill that childhood dream. I’m excited for this Capstone Course. I’m excited for my Senior Project (I will discuss it next week), and I am very excited to graduate and complete a degree in Computer Science.
