Journal 6

 Jan 12- 18

Part I: Help Your Teammates to Develop Capstone Ideas

As predicted in my previous post regarding possible capstone ideas, my team is leaning towards developing a game. In this week's Sunday night meeting, we talked for about 30 minutes on capstone project ideas. I had guessed a game would be popular with the boys since all three of them are into gaming and game development. I am okay with this idea for our project even though it is not particularly in my realm of expertise because I have a bit of experience with game development and can contribute in meaningful ways through design and story. Part of working in a team is being able to compromise and meet in the middle, so I am happy to be given a bigger vote towards other portions of the project if the three boys have their heart set on making a game. Perhaps I can persuade them to make a game that centers around one of my interests, or has a portion of my major focus as a core component of the game. We thought about a racing game, a simulation rpg, or a horror game as a possible topic. I love horror movies and games, so my vote is for the latter. Hopefully we can come to an agreement soon so that we may begin work on the project as soon as possible. Beginning work early will give us more time to flesh out the narrative elements, graphics, and design before we begin the actual programming. One of the boys even floated the idea of making our own game engine. I am eager to learn more about the process and further diversify my coding knowledge.

Part II: Learning Journal

In my opinion, this week was one of the most formative of the course. Through creating a cover page, resume, and website, we are given extremely important tools for our future. My resume was definitely due for some updates, and the lecture and writing lab gave me great insight into how to make my resume more appealing and efficient. I was including way too many unimportant things on the past draft, and I managed to condense it down to just one page of the most important skills and jobs. Dr. Tao's video about what companies are looking for in new hires was very informative, and I made sure to write down each point so that I may include each in my cover letter and resume. In a competitive job market such as computer science, having interesting and effective resumes is of utmost importance. Furthermore, this week's assignment on AI helped to further sharpen my prompt engineering skills. I found this week's assignment to be much easier, and I came to an AI output I was satisfied with much quicker than I did last week. I am appreciative that a writing-based course such as this is not only open to utilizing AI as a tool, but encourages us to do so. Artificial intelligence is the future of our industry, and AI literacy will be a necessary skill in the workforce.