What do money, pizza, wine and textbooks have in common at ECS?

What do money, pizza, wine and textbooks have in common at ECS? They’re all free* Recently I entered a ‘free money’ competition where if I made suitable suggestions to improve the ECS labs up in level 3 of the Zepler Building, then I could be given a cash prize of twenty pounds. Unfortunately, I didn’t win first prize, but I did take second place and was awarded twenty pounds worth of printing credit! One of my suggestions included putting Flash Player on the Linux machines — which the Helpdesk team have done since! It goes to show that the student voice round here is listened to.

My recent coursework involved me in using a graphical framework in Java in order to draw some simple shapes to the screen. Nothing too taxing. However, I was feeling adventurous and decided to try and program Tetris as an extension. At first I thought I was being a little bit ambitious, but in the end, I managed to do it! I even inspired my fellow tutees who have also made games for their extension including Tron and Snake.

One trap I nearly fell into was spending too much time doing programming. While it’s fun and creative, it only counts for one module this semester. I think I speak for all Computer Science students in saying: make sure you balance your time out between modules.

(* – Your tuition fees maybe used to subsidise some of this… but I haven’t heard of other departments offering similar!)