My study: Creative Technology

Since I am studying Creative Technology, I would like to tell you what I think about it so far.
Well at first I need to tell you that there are three courses by now. Those are "We Create Identity", "Graphic Design" and "Introduction To Computer Science".
In the first one or two weeks "We Create Identity" was really confusing for me. This was because I did not really have an idea about the courses goal. By now I like the course and I recognized that this course is mainly about two things. One is that you learn to present yourself, the other thing is to explore a huge amount of technology mainly online, like this blogging site, google documents, google groups and so on.
Graphic Design is a second course which confused me at first, because the course started by talking about numbers, letters and signs and that for hours. But then we went on with talking about pictures. Now I really have an idea how to use typefaces and where to place an object in a picture as well as the colour, size ... I use. This is really helpful and I like to sit in the classroom and talk about the work of my fellow students as well as it is very helpful hearing them talk about your work and making suggestions about what could be done better.
Our third course is Introduction to Computer Science which I liked from the beginning because it really is the most technical course which I am very interested in. We are talking about everything like the OSI model in a very practic way as I think.
Actually that is everything by now and I am looking forward to our programming courses hoping there will be as much game designing aspects as possible :)

Project RiG

In our course "We Create Identity" we got the task to create an interactive video.
For those who do not know what an interactive video is, see one of the examples on www.ximpel.net.
At first we had to decide about which theme we would like to do the video.
There were some given themes:

1. urban -- (un)safety in urban environment(s)
2. climate -- climate change and energy consumption
3. fitness-- (social network) support for sport and fitness
4. media -- prevent(ion) of media and information overload
5. scenario(s) -- emergency / rescue in public area(s)
6. communication -- exchange(s) in private/public space(s) 

... ,but we could also use our own themes.

I was especially interested in the given theme fitness and my own theme education.
Because of that, I searched for classmates having similar interests.
Now my groupmates are Tobias , Ernst , Cecile and Milena.

Well then we started to think about many things how to reach our goals which were create something that improves the fitness of people and their educational knowledge.
I will only tell you in short what it is we figured out finally, you can read more on our homepage.
So we decided to create a game called RiG (Reality interacts Gaming). This game should work on our whole Campus which is very big. It works like following, you need a smartphone which would be offered by the university. The RiG game would be available for these smartphones, of course for free. The game's goal is to get as many points as possible. You can get points by going to your courses. To make sure you really were there you would have to scan a bar code in the classroom which changes every course. Another way to get points is to do sports courses or just do sports on your own which will be recognized by the integrated GPS function. You can always compare your point status with other's point statuses online. In the end of the year the best students get some prices like the X-Tra card for free or some sport clothes or things like that.
Actually that is the main thing about the RiG application. But our interactive video is not that game, it is a story about a fat lazy student who sees the game in an advertisement and has the chance to change his life.
Hopefully I can present you some material soon.

At last I would like to tell you what is my part in this whole project.
Well since we are planning everything together, like the storyline, the video scenes, the texts and so on there is only a few things you do alone - present your group - make changes out of your member's advices...
Those are:
- making an introduction video, although Milena makes one as well.
- searching for music in the videos
- putting the videos together, making an interactive video out of it with XIMPEL.

Well this are so far my tasks I am doing alone at home ;)

The Little Man's Machine

As I am more the technologycal gifted person than the creative, I find it very interesting how machine code language works.
In another of our courses called Introduction to Computer Science we had to programm very simple things with an application called the LittleMan'sMachine, which is nearly like a machine code language. I will talk about the little difference later.
You can find this application on: http://www.atkinson.yorku.ca/~sychen/research/LMC/LittleMan.html .
As you need Java installed on your computer here is a link for Java too: http://www.java.com/de/download/windows_xpi.jsp?locale=de&host=www.java.com .

So we had some tasks to do with this application. After getting to know how the application works we had two main tasks which were the following:


fourth example:

• make a program that compares two numbers (in cells 30 and 31),
• if the first is smaller than the second, a "0" should be written to outbox,
• if the second is smaller than the first one, a "1" should be written to outbox.
• test your program with different numbers. 

fifth example

• make a program that divides the number in cell 30 by the number in cell 31,
• writes the whole number result into cell 32 and the rest in cell 33.

I will upload both of my conclusions but in order to spare time i will only explain the more difficult one (fifth example) .


fourth example conclusion:

fifth example conclusion:

Okay now I will explain the fifth example.
The task was to divide a number by another and gives out the whole number result as well as the rest.
So at first you need to think about how to divide, because in this application there is no operator that can divide.
But as you think about what dividing is you might find out that dividing is simply repeatly subtracting.
For example 5 divided by 2 is 2 and 1 rest, like 5-2=3 and you save 1 time substracted, 3-2=1 and you save 2 times substracted,1 < 2 so you save 2 times substracted and there is 1 rest.
So what out programm has to do is substract the second number from the first and save the number of substractions until the rest is smaller than the second number. 

Explanation of the code:
Cell 0: We load the number in cell 30 which is in the upper example the 5
Cell 1: We save the loaded number (here 5) in cell 20
Cell 2: We load the number in cell 30 again (makes no sence in first run but later we have to jump back to this point)
Cell 3: We subtract the number in cell 31 from the accumulator (here 5-2), the result is saved in the accumulator
Cell 4: We check whether the number in the accumulator is higher or 0. (here 3 >= 0 ==  true) As this is the case we jump to cell 10
Cell 10: We save the value of the accumulator in cell 20 (here 3)
Cell 11: We load the value of cell 32 which is the cell where in the end the whole number result is written in but right now the value is 0
Cell 12: We add the number in cell 8 which is a 1 to the accumulator (0+1=1)
Cell 13: We store the 1 in cell 32 that represents that we did 1 substraction until now
Cell 14: We jump back to cell 2
Cell 2: We load the rest of our number from cell 20 into the accumulator (here 3)
Cell 3: We substract the number in cell 31 from the accumulator value (here 3-2=1)
Cell 4: We check whether the number in the accumulator is higher or 0. (here 1 >= 0 ==  true) As this is the case we jump to cell 10
Cell 10: We save the value of the accumulator in cell 20 (here 1)
Cell 11: We load the value of cell 32 which is the cell where in the end the whole number result is written in (here 1)
Cell 12: We add the number in cell 8 which is a 1 to the accumulator (1+1=2)
Cell 13: We store the 2 in cell 32 that represents that we did 2 substractions until now
Cell 14: We jump back to cell 2
Cell 2: We load the rest of our number again (here1)
Cell 3: We substract the number in cell 31 from the accumulator value (here 1-2=-1)
Cell 4: We check whether the number in the accumulator is higher or 0. (here -1 >= 0 == false) As this isnot the case we do not jump to another cell than simply the next.
Cell 5: We add the last substracted number from the accumulator to get the rest (here -1+2=1)
Cell 6: We save the rest in cell 33 (here 1)
Cell 7: The programm ends


So in the end just the difference between this and real machine code. This is with numbers from 1 to 10 but the real machine code works with only ones and zeros so it would look even more complicated and nearly unreadable.

So i have created my first blog and do not really know what to write in.
At first I would like to say that you can keep any misspelling and try to make an alphabet soup out of it. ;)
So ... something about me:
I am 20 years old.
I like waterpolo and swimming.
I used to play a bit on my e-guitar and of course I like doing computer stuff.
Last but not least I like meeting friends and going out with them.
And for those who randomly visit my blog and do not know me, I am studying Creative Technology at the University of Twente right now ;)