Blog Post 1 Biography

In this first post of a series concerning computer related blog writings the topic of the matter concerns my personal history  and my interest in computer science. To relate my humble experiences with technology we must travel back to the year of 1998. My father for some reason felt like it would be a good idea to buy a Nintendo 64 for my half birthday. At the time my understand of video games/computers was obviously small at best but that didn’t stop me from roaming around the mushroom kingdom playing Super Mario 64. As the years went on I started to play different genres of games from role-playing to racing even inviting some of my other friends over to play and compete with the games we had. Technology though continued to advance and so did my gaming collection. I started to experience all aspects of the gaming spectrum as I moved onto more mobile devices (Playstation Portable, Nintendo DS/ 3DS, Ipod, etc…). I started to find an appreciation for games in general and so a growing interest in software soon started to develop. As I started to progress through middle school I choose to take technology related electives. I also participated with my middle school’s Science and Technology Club. The club generally focused on building Lego mindstorm robots that we used to compete. The robot was able to be programmed through a relatively simple software to do a variety of commands like changing directions or speed of the bot through hitting a sensor. The events were the set pieces for how a team would program their robot. Events ranged from the simplistic sumo bot with having the robot move forward to collide with the opposing teams bot and to see which one would dominate the other to the more complex maze bot that required the use of the sensors mentioned earlier to help the robot get through the maze. My partner and I focused more on the sumo bots designing an impressive front piece of Legos to ram the enemies robots. Beyond middle school and into high school I once again decided to take more technology related courses. It was during this period of my life that I was introduced to computer programming. My first experience with any programing language was Microsoft C++ in which I had design a simplistic program that had the computer display my spring sophomore schedule. That first program, as basic as it was got me inspired to try to build on that knowledge. During that time in the year I along with one of my friends volunteered to represent my school at KSU’s high school programming contest. The experience introduced me to what I could do at the college level.  Going into my junior  year I looked into java programming and game design. Those two classes like my first programming class enlightened me on the capabilities that computers today had and how I could help expand on that if I was to follow this career path. Now here I am in the start of my college career entering into a major that I find fascinating as I look forward to expanding on the knowledge and skills (even if they are a bit rusty!) that I have.