Gabriel Cantres gave DPerry.com a stream of updates and impressions from his stint at the Full Sail School of Game Development and Design. This is the third in a seven part series.

Winter break is now over and I am back in Florida ready to continue my studies at Full Sail. Before I do though, let me tell you what I did during December. December was an excellent month filled with the second half of "Physics and Math" and the new course "Networks and Operating Systems". Besides a few fire alarms randomly going off during a test, all was well during these classes. Let's see what happened.

The second month of Physics and Math concentrated more on the physics side of things. The course covered a lot of material related to motion and gravity and how to represent these concepts with mathematical formulas which can be easily applied to code. We discussed the equations of motion which, in combination with what we learned in the first month, would allow us to move objects in different directions and velocities and also mathematically analyze projectile motion.

We were also lectured on Newton's Laws of Motion (again), but this time we combined these concepts with formulas to calculate impulse, momentum, potential and kinetic energy, work, force, all that good stuff. Collisions were briefly discussed near the end of the course. We learned some of the different types of collisions and the equations that represented them.

A really cool lab that we had during December was the Islands of Adventure lab. During this lab we had the chance of going to the theme park and applying what we learned in class to the roller coasters in the park by calculating different physical properties of the rides. This second month of PM was as great as the first and although I wanted to learn much more time won't allow it, plus I'm getting anxious to start the C++ course.

Networks and Operating Systems, as the name implies, has a lot to do with computers. During the first couple of days the lectures revolved mostly around hardware. As in every computer class, we learned the main components that computers are made up of and began getting more specific starting from there. We discussed the motherboard and all it's parts including all the types of slots and sockets, controllers, ports and so on. After going through all the hardware, the course started focusing on the OP (operation system) side of things. Windows98/2000, Unix/Linux, BeOS, MacOS, we covered them all. We learned how different OSes worked, what some excelled at and other's shortcomings.

During lab we played around with the different operating systems by making partitions to install them and then setting them up, customizing and make them internet ready. Then came the networking part of the course where we were lectured about networking hardware, internet history, TCP/IP, streaming media, etc. After our networking lectures we began dealing with internet security during labs and setting up web servers in Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux. A little Quake 3 was also played after all the day's work was done.

December was a very short, but very fun month. I learned a lot of little details about hardware and operating systems, and finally got to see what BeOS is like. I also relearned a lot of the physics concepts that were taught in high-school and added some new ones into the mix. Now I want to start adding those concepts into some code. Luckily, C++ is coming up next and it sounds like fun. I'll let you know.

Posted by: Andrew at March 26, 2006 5:54 PM

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