Long time, no post. So I’ve pretty much finished working on Auctomatic since August, and gone back to finish my education :)
Impressions of subjects so far:
English: Much more fun than Junior Cert. Have a ninja teacher. Macbeth is gripping.
Irish: Improved vastly since I got a new teacher.
Maths: Easy and mostly enjoyable. Most interesting occurence so far has been school asking students to get new fancy Casio calculators, which can handle algebra and fractions. This of course means they refuse to give answers as decimals. Result? 7 * root 3 = 7 root 3. 2 pi = 2 pi. Many frustrations ensue.
Spanish: Would be great if they didn’t keep it at a 2nd year level. Why not just throw us in at the deep end and we’ll learn more? Example: the teacher speaks English rather than Spanish to us. I mean come on!
Physics: Currently covering stuff we’ve done to much more depth in Applied Maths, so I doze through most classes. Ask me again in a month.
Chemistry: More learning than I had anticipated. It also turns out JC chemistry told us many, many lies and half-truths. Have concluded giving squirty bottles, fire or acid (or all three) to students of any age is a risky idea.
History: Didn’t think I could enjoy this as much as I am. Course is fascinating (Bismarck ftw!), a four page essay is almost an enjoyable task. I’ve started comparing friends to 19th century diplomats subconsciously.
Applied Maths: The intersection of Maths and Fun. It’s like they took what you knew in maths, and made cool problems for your enjoyment. They of course left out all the ugly, messy stuff like trigonometry. It’s kind of annoying though when you remember that none of your calculations will ever be right because of that prick air resistance.
Design and Communication Graphics (i.e. dressed-up Tech Drawing): New course has 40% for a SolidWorks (CAD) project. SolidWorks is surprisingly easy to pick up and looks great. Most of my computer time I’m not actually working, just rotating my piece and watching the light bounce off it.
All in all, being back at school’s pretty enjoyable. Doing other stuff like student politics, debating, chess etc. on the side. Life is good.
February 22, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I used to love Applied Maths too. The air resistance problem isn’t huge though, once you change over to differention + integration for the calculations it’s pretty much just a case of adding in (some constant x Velocity^2) of acceleration to account for air resistance… of course if your projectile goes too high the air density changes… then higher still and X Y and Z change
As far as I remember, pretty much all of the problems in Leaving Cert APM could be solved with the standard equations like S=UT +1/2A(T^2), but doing things the calculus way makes it possible to model more realistically, which is what you’ll get to do in uni :)