I love my internship. I’m doing fun, challenging coding work, I’m absorbing office culture, and I get to sit in on seminars about business practices. It’s great because I feel like I’m learning what I need to know about the software industry that I can’t learn in a classroom.

But moreover, my internship is great because I don’t have signs like these on my door anymore. As much as I’m excited to go back this fall, I’m so glad classes are out for summer!

Here’s my latest computer animation project: Cage Puzzle. The assignment was to “create a unique world with its own rules: A world where what is possible, though seemingly impossible, is possible.” I chose the world of a little caged creature, with props in his cage with new rules he has to learn in order to get an award. This was animated in Autodesk Maya.

Here’s my third computer animation project. The assignment was to animate two walking figures such that they describe a particular kind of space. I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, and I’d appreciate any comments or criticism.

I’m taking a computer animation course using Maya this semester, and our second project was due today. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I thought it was worth sharing here. The assignment was pretty vague; the professor basically wanted us to experiment with pushing and pulling, using the methods we’d used in the labs. I decided to go with a corkscrew.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvement, I’d love to hear them. I will probably have to modify this animation anyway before I turn in my whole portfolio at the end of the semester.

I subscribe to the Google Student Blog primarily for scholarship announcements, but the majority of posts are ideas on how students can use Google Docs to simplify their lives. Sometimes the suggestions are good, but most of the time the ideas are too mundane to be of much use. The most recent post, however, is just patronizing. Apparently the Google Docs help site has set up a new Docs for Students page, designed to “highlight how various student populations can use Google Docs in their daily life.” Unfortunately, rather than sort tips and tricks by document type or class subject, the content is distributed among five stories of fictional students using Docs to accomplish tasks that might be better accomplished though other means. For example,

Lisa is a French major and very excited about starting her classes. On the first day of class, the French teacher doesn’t speak a word of English. Lisa’s French is good but she realizes she needs some help. To test her ability, she pastes an article about soccer from a French newspaper in a Google Docs document and tries to understand what it says. Then, she uses the Translate document feature to test her knowledge. Turns out, she doesn’t know as many French words as she’d like to, but this helps her improve her vocabulary.

Granted, I appreciate being able to translate chunks of foreign-language text into English. I am just amazed that Google thinks that it isn’t enough to inform me of the feature, and that it would be better to frame a story of a French major around the feature so that I might better relate to her. It sounds as though it is supposed to appeal to a middle school student, rather than a college student. (A college student should at least know that Lisa would learn more effectively if she looked up the unknown words herself, rather than translating the document all in one go.)

Sadly, it gets worse.

Lisa’s life long dream is to study abroad in Paris. She applies for a study abroad program during her Sophomore year. To help her gain an edge on the competition, she decides to use one of the many professional looking resume templates in the Google Docs template gallery and picks one particular template called Blue Rays Resume. Between the styles on the template and her well written essay in French, she impresses the judges and is selected to go to Paris.

I’m no human resources expert, but I shudder at the thought of sending out my resume using that template. Google does have a few nice resume templates, but that isn’t one of them. What is Google trying to tell me here? If I use Google Docs, I could be chosen to go to Paris like Lisa?

Google could have made a well-organized list of reasons why college students should use Docs. There really are some compelling reasons, including no cost, ease of collaboration, and the ability to back up documents and access them from any browser. Instead, they wrote success stories for us to relate to. I’m just not impressed.

One of my favorite classes this semester has been Intro to Cognitive Science. I took the class because more than a few of my friends who think the same way I do are Cognitive Science majors, and this semester the class was taught by one of the rock-star professors in the department. He’s a great lecturer, and I think I’ve learned a lot from the class about cognitive function, as well as the crossover between cognitive science and computer science. I might even get more into studying artificial intelligence before I graduate.

That said, while I think very highly of this professor, he did something I thought to be ridiculous this past week: he assigned a group essay.

I dislike group projects as much as the next person, because I worry that my group members will slack off and leave me with the brunt of the work. But even if they’re all hard workers, it still doesn’t feel fair to me that my grade will be partially determined by the efforts of people I have no control over. So to take control and ensure a good project, I feel pressured to take extra time and help the group members who need extra coaching to produce a decent piece of writing, which still does not seem fair.

Just having a group project is one thing, and I probably would have been okay with a different kind of project. Usually in these sorts of situations the group members can divvy up the work and put it all together close to the due date, spending minimal time consulting with other group members. But this assignment was a group essay. Essays, as I know them, are supposed to have a single point of view throughout to create coherence. How were we supposed to write the paper, I thought, without sitting together the whole time so that the person who wrote the conclusion knew what the person who who wrote the introduction had written? How was one paragraph supposed to follow smoothly to the next when the next paragraph had not been written yet?

The worst part, I felt, was that this was the last assignment in the class before finals season, meaning that during the time everyone was rushing to finish final class projects and study for finals, we also had to find time to meet as a group. It would have been more courteous, I thought, for the professor to have assigned this project much earlier in the semester.

Despite the fact that I spent a significantly larger amount of time worrying about the paper than actually writing it, the method we used to divide the work actually worked fairly well. Everyone did their research and came up with topics for the essay independently, and we went with the best idea among the four of us. The essay prompt came with 8 questions that had to be answered, so we divvied up the questions and answered them each in a paragraph or two. To put the whole thing together, we used Google Docs to compile our sections into one document, then sat around a table for a couple hours, each on our own laptops, reading through the paper, asking each other questions about what we had written, and editing simultaneously (Google Docs is cool with simultaneous editing like that). The end result did not flow as a paper written by one person might have, but it was at least coherent. My fellow group members really liked the simultaneous editing idea, and they had fun watching comments and corrections appear spontaneously in their writing.

I understand why students have to complete group projects: working in groups doesn’t stop in school, and we’ll probably be doing collaborative work the rest of our lives. For this paper specifically, the professor told us outright that the reason he assigned it was that no one researcher writes a scientific paper alone anymore, and that articles are now expected to include descriptions of how each author contributed. However, the difference between group projects in business and in schools is that in business there is usually a designated group leader, whereas in school the group members are expected to agree on everything democratically. This slows down the group’s progress and increases the need for constant consultation, which is the part that bothers me the most.

In retrospect, I guess assigning a group essay was not all that silly. I did learn some cool stuff about how the brain processes vision, and I did introduce my groupmates to the wonders of Google Docs. But the experience was still stressful, and like most students, I wish my professors would refrain from assigning group projects altogether!

I’ve been a Dropbox user for about six months now, and it’s been pretty useful. I use it primarily to transfer files between my own computer and my computer science department lab account. It also comes in handy to share a quick picture online: dragging and dropping the file into my public dropbox folder is easier than opening a browser and uploading the picture to a hosting service. Still, it’s only been useful in a minor way so far, and hasn’t really done anything I couldn’t have done already with a little more effort.

That has changed. Enter the Dropbox iPhone app [iTunes link]. This app solves a problem I’ve been having, namely storing PDFs on my iPod Touch. A few of my professors upload their class readings online as PDFs, and before now I’d had no way of storing several PDFs on my iPod for offline viewing. The Dropbox app lets you not only access files in your Dropbox folder, but lets you download your “favorites” for faster (offline) viewing. This essentially gives my iPod the eReader functionality I’ve been wanting since I got it. I’ve tried other apps, like Stanza, for uploading PDFs, but I had too much trouble syncing. Stanza must be synced over a local wifi network, and my school’s network doesn’t seem to allow it. Syncing to the Dropbox app couldn’t be easier; it’s just click and drag.

The other problem the Dropbox app solves is transferring photos quickly and easily from the iPod Touch to my computer. Syncing my iPod with my Mac is a pain sometimes; half the time the computer refuses to recognize the iPod at all, and the other half of the time, it thinks it’s a camera and doesn’t open iTunes. Now I can upload photos from my iPod to my Dropbox account, and from there I can save them on my computer in less time than it takes iTunes to realize my iPod has been plugged in. Admittedly, this would be a more useful feature if I had an iPhone instead of an iPod Touch, but this feature did allow me to upload the screenshots I took quite speedily.

Unfortunately, the Dropbox app only lets you upload photos. It would be fantastic if it could upload notes as text files. If it had just this one extra feature, I’d probably pay about $5 for the app. However, the best part is that I don’t have to. It’s free!

Click to expand thumbnails of the app in action.

This new semester marks my third year studying Japanese, and I don’t think I could have done it without jisho.org and its Kanji by Radicals index (jisho is dictionary in Japanese).  In my Advanced Japanese class, we primarily review grammar and learn new Kanji, but the hardest part for me is that the instructions in our homework are in Japanese for the first time. Jisho.org has saved my life, or at least my homework, on more than one occasion this year, and for this I thank it.

Update (9/19/09): I recently discovered that Jisho.org also has a mobile version for iPhone/iPod Touch that works better than most dedicated Japanese translation apps. I highly recommend it!