Experiences from Teaching 2D Game Development to Possibly Changing College Majors as a Senior

During the Summers of 2018-2019, I’ve had the opportunity of being involved with some of the brightest students from across Atlanta, Georgia during the Digital Learners to Leaders summer coding camp. The Digital Learners to Leaders program provides growth and development by using coding, maker spaces, and e-sports which provides community literacy for adolescents interested in technology and collegiate opportunities at Georgia State University for their families. In 2018, students solved world problems by developing virtual reality environments which were simulations of how their solutions would affect people globally. In 2019, students developed their very own 2D games using C# and Unity. The challenge of deciding which year was the best is by far the hardest decision I would have to make and in the follow blog, I’ll share why that is in terms of the 2019 cohort.

First, I want to share how important it is to have solid people around you and this goes for the students as well as fellow staff members throughout the camp. Fellow staff and I definitely went above and beyond for each other during every single stage of this program which provided the feeling of relief after departing each day knowing that someone will stretch you but also be there for you if assistance is needed. With a sense of fellowship, I was able to recall the proximity effect theory which is a subject studied in education. Students began to work together and even challenged each other with their game development knowledge to build the best 2D game. In my opinion, I believe this was a great introduction in understanding how software engineering has it’s similarities across multiple object oriented languages and software development applications.

As I consider coding labs as a public service offered aside from private projects, I’ve noticed my own personal desire to not give up with the pursuit of comprehending knowledge in mathematics and science. In terms of Unity, colliders and rigid body objects derive from physics and object movement as well as the the placement of objects in the user interface uses vectors which derives from calculus. Both physics and calculus are prerequisites to understand theories in computational neuroscience. Computational neuroscience is a motivator for the continued pursuit of an education in Human Learning and Development in order to apply tech knowledge with medicine to build application prototypes for MedicineBits.com. Opportunities such as DLL (Digital Learners to Leaders) at Georgia State University provides support exemplified in Lev Vygotsky’s scaffolding theory from cognitive psychology.

After studying theories such as Lev Vygotsky’s in human learning and development, I’ve been able to strengthen my own knowledge in coding and I’ve become more specific about goals for products. For example, I’d like to conduct feature engineering of digital signal processing to create software that automatically detects brain seizure using EEG sensors from real-time data using supervised learning. Using supervised learning, you will usually solve one of two problems: binary classification (i.e. seizure/no seizure similar to spam/no spam) or regression (assigning a number to a given case such as making a salary prediction based on characteristics). In order to achieve this, I would need to specifically understand math and computer science subjects such as linear regression, gradient descent, linear classifiers, logistic regression, supervised classification algorithms such as decision tree learning and random forest.