End of Week 14 02/23/25

At this point, I have worked through almost the entire unity tutorial. I am in the process of compiling my various unity “scenes” into a gallery of sorts to be viewed on my unity play page. I will eventually make a project video about unity and include a link to my page. As I am wrapping up this gallery, I am working on a “bonus” scene which will constitute my first game. I am using a pre-made unity character which moves, runs, and jumps. It has all of the components and animations pre-built. I will of course learn how to make one of my own eventually, but for right now this is too complex, and using a pre-made allows me to focus on the other aspects of development. This character moves through a custom made city scene complete with streets, buildings, and a dark atmosphere. When it is all said and done, there will be zombies to shoot and kill, a health bar, and an objective. More to come in the future!

Math and other Subjects

Science and history used to bore me because it was all memorization. A test required that you knew what a mitochondria was or when the Incas were at their most powerful. I’m a junior now and science is my favorite subject. History is what it is, still a memory game and not necessarily for me, but science is a deeply fascinating subject with limitless fields. I am in AP Chemistry, a challenging but rewarding class. I will likely never be a chemist, but I enjoy theoretical reactions and situations. Equilibrium, thermodynamics, and kinetics are fun to experiment with. I will take physics next year and am very excited about that. I am determined for a deep understanding and refuse to memorize. In this case, I have the freedom to refuse. By the time I graduate, I want to be able to accurately predict where a golf ball will end up if hit will a certain force, if in the presence of certain wind speeds, etc. I want to know about the properties of projectile motion. If asked to make a video game physics engine, I want to be able to do so.

Math allows for this freedom up to a certain point. In my experience, the shift from memorization to application has the reverse effect in mathematics. The sweet spot for math is that which is used in scientific application. Visualizable, efficient, and fun. Once the application of math is fully realized, it goes down an interesting path. I competed in a math competition over the weekend where I took an Algebra II test. 20 questions, the highest score wins. I took second with 14 correct answers. I took practice tests before and studied a reasonable amount. Admittedly, though, a lot of the test performance was reliant upon my general knowledge and a little of what I learned in Algebra II years ago. I may have made a mistake or two, but the majority of the incorrect answers were questions I never would have pieced together on my own. They required the memorization of formulas and processes. This step over the line is where I become wary. Of course there are people far smarter than myself who are able to visualize math and see its use to a level far beyond the one I have reached, but I would be a memorizer in these situations. If memorization is a necessity, I accept the challenge in competition and tests. I will, however, never be a mathematician if this is a continuous shift away from intuition. Perhaps in higher education I will be enlightened to the magic of advanced math, but for now the difference between remembering the distance formula and memorizing the Aztecan cultural traditions is harder to see.