CSSI Day 12: App Engine Projects and Kayaking

Today was only a half-day of classes in the morning, which consisted of working on select App Engine projects to further practice the skills that we'd learned from the week. For the first hour, I had to focus on debugging my code from yesterday after adding in a new feature; the process was painstaking because my code appeared perfectly fine and so it involved going through line-by-line. Through this, I learned an important lesson: App Engine templates still read code that is "commented out"; while no normal programming language (that I've encountered, at least) actually executes code that is labelled as comments, the App Engine template  did. While this problem took far too long to solve, I'm really glad that I learned about this unique feature of templates to help in future projects.

Afterward, I worked on a "Rock Paper Scissors" application, in which the user plays against the computer - randomly generated computer responses. The basic setup game was quite easy to program, which I'm hoping means that I am improving in my App Engine/incorporating Python with HTML/CSS code skills. I hope to add more features to the application before I launch it, but here is what it looks like now (again, graphics are minimal as I haven't been focusing too much on the CSS aspect of the code):

Start screen of game

Game results page

After having lunch, we had a tech talk with a biologist who is currently working on a team and with Google on projects such as looking at different antibodies and researching how to create antibodies to match antigens of diseases, and mapping out neural pathways of the entire brain. This was really interesting because it exposed us to some of the projects that Google takes part in aside from its main line of products, as well as how computer science factors into these projects. Having learned about the immune system and the nervous system in Biology class, I was able to understand the more technical aspects of the presentation more deeply. However, I think that this talk really opened all of our eyes to ways where computer science isn't the main component, but still extremely important in other ventures. Computers are masterfully taken advantage of to do tasks at a faster and more efficient rate of humans; however because the greatest "computer" - the brain - has yet to be replicated, there are many issues to be encountered when working with technology. While these smaller challenges may be eventually resolved, looking at the bigger picture really makes me wonder just how much more information is beyond the reach of humans and computers alike, and the extent to which it will take for us to acquire such knowledge to our satisfaction.  

Kayaking and paddleboarding right against the Seattle skyline.

In the afternoon, we visited Alki Beach, a local Seattle park, to go on a kayaking tour! This was my first experience with kayaking, so I was extremely stoked. I was expecting for it to be harder to balance in the boat, but after we got in, even in a two-person kayak it seemed difficult to capsize. I definitely wasn't expecting to get so wet though! Not only did we get wet due to residual water from our paddles, but we started a little water fight in the kayaks amongst CSSIers and in the end many of us were soaked. However, the entire experience was fantastic; we got to kayak along the coast of Alki Beach for over an hour, and it felt both fun and relaxing. Later, we had dinner on the lakeside in the park with interns who were working at Google for the summer, which also gave us time to soak in the fantastic weather.

I also tried skateboarding for the first time...
and was consequently very, very shaky.
This photo masks it well though!

Hanging off the edge of the lake during dinnertime!

During free time, we walked down to the beach and even got to play a bean bag toss game similar to "Cornhole" or "Tailgate", where a two-person team tries to score points by tossing and then hitting bean bags into the holes. This afternoon was a fantastic way to wrap up the day and enjoy the Seattle sights from the lake; not only did I get to try kayaking for the first time, but simply hanging out with everyone outdoors in the fabulous weather was a blast.