Alright so I’m finally going to discuss the new courses I’m taking now.
CSC 395 – Research Colloquium – I’m pretty excited about this course. It’s completely online and every week there will be a lecture by a guest speaker on new work in areas of computing. Hopefully there are some talks relevant to my interests, but nonetheless I love TED talks, so this should be similar.
GAM 341 – Introduction to Level Design – Since I’m majoring in Computer Game Development and focusing on the programming portion of it, I figured I should also get a little more experience in the non-programming parts. We’re going to be using Unreal Engine 4, which I’m pretty stoked about!
GAM 376 – AI for Computer Games – I’ve always been interested in artificial intelligence. Actually, in the class I’ll describe next we’re discussing AI through a philosophical perspective. I’ll probably post more on this later. As for this course, I hope we don’t just use some already-implemented AI algorithms and we can actually write our own. I doubt it though.
PHL 242 – Philosophy & Technology – We’re discussing what technology actually is. Admittedly, when asked this question I thought it was going to be easy to define. I was horribly wrong. While it isn’t required, I may read the recommended material, “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” by Manuel De Landa. We read the first chapter and thinking about how a robot historian would describe its history is something that made me extremely intrigued.
SOC 281 – Sociology of Rock Music – This is kind of weird, yes, and I know that. It fulfills some requirement that I needed to complete, so hey why not? We’re going to trace Rock Music from the beginning to now, and I’m thinking I’ll learn a lot. The professor asked in the first day of class what we knew about rock. While I do know some stuff, and I listen to rock all the time, I wrote that I had no knowledge of rock. I think this will benefit me because starting with a blank-ish slate should be fun.
Anyhow, I wasn’t going to take these classes and considered switching majors. I’ll explain why in the next post.