fandomhigh | Zen Computer Science - Period 3 - Tuesday

Flynn waited for everyone to file in.

"Since last week was a bit... off." he grimaced. "Let's spend this week having a bit more hands-on."
Sitting on his desk, he motioned to an "inbox". "If anyone did complete their homework, you can drop it off here."
Looking around, he continued. "But if you didn't, then there was obviously a problem."

"I do understand that some of you just aren't too majorly familiar with computers or computers of this time."
He stood up. "Therefore, today, we're just going to play with the computers." He grinned that patented Flynn grin of his.

"For those who aren't as fluent, I've assigned my TA, Mac to help out. But I know that a couple of others of you...
and yes, I'm looking at you Ami-chan and you Willow..." he winked. "Are also very computer literate."

"You'll find that your machines have access to any game or program known to run on personal computers."
He sat down in his chair, trying not to circle his desk.

"I want you to pick something, and then write an essay on what you like, dislike and how you feel it could be improved.
This doesn't have to be a technical schematic, just put into it what you feel.. whether it be 'better pictures' or 'more blood'...
then think logically and tell me how it could be added/subtracted in... not in terms of codes or numbers... more like what you
would remove or add in to make it better. "

"For instance, say you were playing with a medical database. I'm sure Henry would appreciate something like that..." he looked over
towards the young man. "But the interface was lacking something that would make it easier to search for a certain pathogen, or disease."

"So then tell me that you'd put a new search function in for that certain pathogen, or a way to make the database more open to better search queries.
This doesn't require any knowledge of coding at all, and yes, you can draw pictures if you have to."

"Now. Have fun."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Play your games or work your programs here.

Feeling a little more heartened after the lecture, Henry started to work with the computer. He'd had a chance to try one out in his Popular Culture class, and he was pleased to find that he wasn't having too much trouble.
Henry pulled up a program called "Excel," and toyed around with some graphs.

Mac is just in the process of getting one of her Sims abducted by aliens.

She'll happily put that on pause if anyone needs to ask her anything, though.

... or hey, if you just want to help her ruin virtual lives, that's fine too.

Nova doesn't really know what to do with the computer on his own. He looks around to see what everyone else is doing instead.

AMi looked over at Nova. "Hey. Need help?"

Nova blushed, not thinking anyone was paying attention to him while he was watching everyone else.

He nodded to Ami. "Where...should I start?"

Ami paused her game and walked over. "Well, it is already on so you are set there. It is full of games, what sort of games do you like to play?"

Nova frowned at the computer screen.

"I....don't know any..."

At least, he didn't know any computer games.

"Well lets see what we have here" Ami looked over the icons. "Looks like you have cards, tic-tac-toe, car racing, chess, sports simulations, life simulations, checkers and go, and... a whole lot of other stuff. Do you like any non-computer games? There is probably a version..." as long as he wasn't from some strange universe where they had weird games...

The games sounded familiar even if he had never played any of them. He was sure he had seen people playing their hand-helds and board games like go and chess. Not playing any himself, he didn't really have a preference.

"Can you choose one?"

"Oh, ok, sure." Ami double clicked on tic-tac-toe. On the theory that it was crazy-easy. "Here, this is tic-tac-toe, except with giraffes and elephants instead of exes and ohs." She pointed to the screen. "The computer goes first, see it put an elephant here. You just need to click where you want the giraffe to go."

Ami opens up a chess program and starts playing against the computer. Eventually she determines that though the click-to-select and click-to-position interface is nice what this program needs is some drag-and-drop.

The only real difficulty that Naomi had was adjusting to the simplicity of 21st century computers. Once she had figured that out she was playing a game of freecell.

Rikku cracked her knuckles. So this was a computer, huh? Okay.

Looked pretty self-explanatory. Just a machina with an input keyboard and a display console. The letters were in a weird order, and the moving pointer took some getting used to, but everything made sense. The little icons were all marked, and there was even the word "Start" in big letters in the corner. That helped.

Five minutes later, Rikku was giddily opening programs, closing them, minimizing and maximizing windows, and occasionally giggling and clapping her hands.

Willow pulled up the Demons, Demons, Demons website and started making notes about how she'd improve it, both in terms of overall layout and in terms of the coding.

Zen Computer Science - Period 3 - Tuesday - Week 4

Playtime!

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