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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
(* – Your tuition fees maybe used to subsidise some of this… but I haven’t heard of other departments offering similar!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33312,33309,33311],"tags":[129911,430816,75,430815,364,430777],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-in-southampton","category-project-work","category-southampton-university-life","tag-coursework","tag-free-stuff","tag-linux","tag-perks","tag-programming","tag-zepler","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BSCk-9D","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1201,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/1201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}