It gives you wiiings!

I just realized that I am officially a university student. Not in the sense that I moved seven hours away from home, not in the sense that my rent and tuition drained my savings, not even in the sense that I go to classes and sometimes spend it daydreaming more than actually working. I think the moment I passed my own type of “initiation” that actually makes me a real university student was an evening two weeks ago when I went to an Avril Lavigne concert with my roommate/best friend Mathew.

 

But Avril has gone from this...

...to this.

After attempting to get my obscene homework stack completed before the concert and failing miserably, I figured I could just stop stressing, stay up late for a night and get it all done. After taking the bus to the concert, getting decked out in concert clothes and singing, dancing and screaming the entire night, it was time to head home and assault my workload. I had a friend who was in most of the same classes as me pop over so I would have some company working. Needless to say, we got a little distracted. A couple packs of noodles, a couple of hours of staring at math problems, and a LOT of caffeine later, I realized that I was like a real university student, at least in the stereotypical way. I was up until 5 working, then up again at 9 to finish it all off. Red Bull did not give me any wings that day.

I had a slightly different experience with my learning project this week. I spent an evening playing my game with a friend. Playing with a person is different than playing with an AI because as you learn, so does your opponent. Because of this, learning a new tricky attack or maneuver is not enough to beat a human opponent. When I was spending my time fighting against the AI, I could just practice until I won. Against a person, sometimes he learns faster than I do, so I continue to lose. But this actually causes me to learn faster. The AI has a somewhat predictable reaction time and variety of attacks based on the difficulty level, but a person’s style of play changes around frequently and without warning. I found this significantly more challenging than playing against a machine.

I played around with a variety of characters. With my old favorites Mr. Game and Watch and Toon Link, I had quite a few victories. But that is far too simple for this learning project. I tried out a few characters I was meaning to practice with: Zelda (I lost), Ice Climbers (I lost again) and Snake (my character was essentially the equivalent of a kite in a tornado). But my losses were getting closer and closer by the end of the night. I should spend more time playing against friends to gain more information during my play time.

Picture Bibliography:

– (2008) “Free Wallpapers” GT Wallpaper

http://en.gtwallpaper.com/avril-lavigne.html

(October 26, 2011)

– (March 24, 2011) “Avril Lavigne Talks Marriage Again” Hollywood on Crack

http://hollywoodoncrack.net/category/avril-lavigne/

(October 26, 2011)

– (October 25, 2011) “Adult Sleep Apnea” The Dallas Center for Sleep Disorders

http://www.dallas-sleep.com/adult-sleep-apnea.php

(October 26, 2011)

Tech Task #7: Global Learning

This week, for our online session, we had Silvia Tolisano join us for a presentation about global learning. She explained how sharing students’ work with others around the globe gives these students the motivation to create better work. When the children know that someone other than their teachers are going to appreciate their work, they want to create work that is worth appreciating.

Silvia explained that there are often students that are only aware of the situation of their own country. Because of economical and social reasons, the world is becoming more and more globally interconnected. Speaking a foreign language and being globally aware are now very important in today’s society.

For my own classroom in the future, I would want my students to communicate with other students around the world. Besides learning about the interesting differences in culture, I think the students will be amazed at the differences in the value of learning and education in other parts of the world.

Maybe there needs to be a type of social media meant specifically for education, where students worldwide can see and compare their work with others. Perhaps this exists already, but I have not heard about anything like that…

Picture Bibliography:

– (Undated) “Global Competence and the Afterschool Hours” Asia Society

http://asiasociety.org/education/afterschool/global-competence-and-afterschool-hours

(October 23, 2011)

And now for something completely different…

Instead of just playing my video game and writing about the experience, I spent a couple of hours researching interesting tips and techniques about both general battle tips and specific character tips.

One move that I had no idea that I was able to do is the shield grab. While a character is guarding and blocking opponent attacks, he can grab and throw an enemy immediately after guarding. This would have come in handy so much if I had known this earlier! Another thing I hadn’t thought of was that only one character can grab an edge at a time. The edge grab is the final defense of a character that prevents him from falling to his death. If an enemy is sent flying and can barely make it back to the stage, quickly jump off the stage and grab the edge, ruining your opponent’s final hope of being saved.

Instead of writing about how to use characters, I found some information about the weaknesses of various ones and how to defeat them. The slower powerhouses like Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Ganondorf can be defeated quite easily with speedy characters and well-timed dodges. Unfortunately, the reverse holds true as well. The quick characters tend to have very little weight to them, so not a whole lot of strength is required to send them flying. A few smashes are often all that is needed to finish them off. Characters like Zero Suit Samus, Kirby, Jigglypuff, and Pickachu need to wary of this.

The vast majority of the learning I’ve been doing has been by doing. I have spent some time reading about the characters and techniques, but I figured I would learn the most easily by practicing. This actually reminds me very much of my cooking class I had taken last year. In that class, everyone was to read a recipe, then immediately learn to make it while following along with the instructions. For my character practice last month, I read a short biography before testing each one out. This was so I would have a small idea what to expect from each character. Both experiences with learning were more about physically learning to do something, but with some written information to prepare beforehand.

Considering that playing video games is such a sedentary activity, I have been quite surprised that the learning reminds me of learning more physical activities. This week, I also spent some time playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl with a friend and watching how his playing differs from mine. This made me think about when I was in volleyball in high school. I would watch someone perform a serve or spike, and I would try to imitate their motions. I had to do the same thing for my learning project. It was a strange connection, or at least I thought so.

Gaming Stick

equals

Cooking Stick

which equals

Not A Stick

???

Picture Bibliography:

– (7 December, 2006) “File:WiiRemoteImage.jpg” Wikipedia

(October 18, 2011)

– (12 October, 2010) “Filming Locations” Film Trailer Project With Advertising

http://mediaproject2advertising.wordpress.com/category/all-old-work/page/5/

(October 18, 2011)

– (8 October, 2011) “Mustang’s Blog” Portage Central Volleyball

http://portagecentralvolleyball.org/

(October 18, 2011)

The REAL life of a U of R student!

This week for my ECMP 355 class, we have to post a one minute video on our blog. I chose to do “The Life of a U of R Student” with Kaylyn Wallen. We decided to do a bit of a parody instead of being overly serious. Who wants to watch a video of us sitting in our desks, anyway? I had a ton of fun filming this. We had to do several takes of me running through the halls and being a creeper. Needless to say, half the university population now thinks I’m completely insane. But a quarter already thought that, so I don’t really mind.

Since Kaylyn had an injury, she had the talking roles in our video, while I acted out her explanations. We used her computer to edit the movie. She had the IMovie program, which made editing really simple. I couldn’t believe how simple it was to crop out copious amounts of laughter and turn an elevator ride into a scene from Paranormal Activity.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Happy Thanksgiving to my readers! I went home to La Ronge, which is about 6 and a half hours north of the city. I stuffed myself with turkey and other goodness. My fridge is now stuffed with leftover turkey and nam yee chicken, a Chinese dish with chicken and potatoes in a tangy bean curd sauce.

The drive to and from La Ronge were not the best. It was raining pretty heavily the entire way home, and there were 3 deer on the road at one point. On the way back, there was a duck crossing the road. There was very little traffic, so we slowed down to avoid hitting the duck. It just continued gingerly waddling across the road, so we started to steer around it. Then a car blows by from behind us, but since we were already on the wrong side, this car had to pass us on the shoulder. He didn’t even slow down, so he must have passed us going at least 100km/h on the shoulder. That was scary moment…

It was nice to be back home again. This was my first time home since I moved here. I missed my family. My older brother went to visit his girlfriend in Shellbrook instead of coming home, so I didn’t get to see everyone. I suppose I will have to wait for Christmas for that…

Picture Bibliography:

– (29 October, 2009) “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Wussu.

http://www.wussu.com/humour/chicken.html

(October 11, 2011)

We are now experiencing technical difficulties…

A good portion of my time this week was spent trying to play around with the settings of my blog. I figured out how to add pictures, categorize my posts, add picture bibliography, and various other bits of blogging goodness.

I managed to play my game for a couple of hours. I tried out using a character that I strongly dislike using in classic mode. Classic mode is a series of battles, one after the other. Sometimes these battles are with teammates, sometimes one on one, and sometimes one versus 10 or more weak versions of a certain character. By comparison to these weaker counterparts, your character often comes off like a combination of Superman, the Terminator, and Jesus. A smash is often an instant kill. There are bonus rounds every so often, a mini-game involving smashing targets within a time limit for extra points.

Because the point of this project is to learn and improve, I chose to use Princess Peach, a character I find to be moderately useless. I played classic mode on a medium difficulty setting, with three lives.

I managed to get through the first six levels quite easily, losing only one life in the process. Then came Giant Kirby. If this fight was being narrated by a sports announcer, I have a feeling it would go something like this:

Om nom nom...

“ANOTHER excellent smash attack on Kirby’s part! Peach is going, going… GONE! With only a single life left, she is fighting with all she has! Is that a parsnip she’s throwing at Kirby? Apparently Kirby is immune to all assaults by vegetables! Who would’ve thought?! Kirby has taken the offensive, striking a smash ball and making Peach and her parsnips into a delicious stew! Goodbye, Princess!”

Picture Bibliography: “Kirby” The official super smash bros brawl Kirby topic!

http://ssbbb.myfastforum.org/archive/the-official-super-smash-bros-brawl-kirby-topic__o_t__t_47.html

(October 2, 2011)