CSSI Day 6: Ylvis, Alice in Wonderland, and Saying Goodbye

This morning, a little too early in the morning, we were all reminded of this lovely viral song from a few months ago...

So what does the fox say? This was our morning exercise for reviewing everything that we learned yesterday. We had to write up a program to generate lyrics similar to the infamous Ylvis song, where various animal sounds appear a random number of times in the verses and choruses. I thought it was really funny that such an odd example fit perfectly with practicing implementing dictionaries, functions, and for loops in Python. However, this guided coding was only the beginning to the day; although we didn't learn much new programing today, the projects that we worked on naturally became increasingly challenging.

Our main project of the day was called "Alice in Wonderland", a program to determine the number of unrepeated words in the text of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. This involved many interesting challenges including removing all the punctuation from the text and then turning all the words into a list. I managed to search up a few new functions to simplify the code, such as set(), which removes all duplicate items from a list, and using tuples and sorted() in order to sort dictionaries (associative arrays) by values instead of keys. Including added features and all, the Alice in Wonderland took almost an entire day to code; however it worked quite well in the end.

After lunch, we had a "Careers at Google" panel where got to hear from a group of Google employees who each answered many questions about their jobs, including what they worked on, how they got the job, as well as highlights and challenges that they met in their everyday work. Learning from the employees' many personal perspectives on what the various positions entailed was very interesting, because everyone's experiences were different and they each had very good advice to share. The words and stories that the employees shared with us were tangible experiences that had actually occurred, making them in many ways more accurate representations of what different careers at Google would entail.

As I mentioned in the last post, today was "fancy Friday" at Google, in which people who wanted to dressed up in a "beach wedding" theme. They made a big deal out of it by setting up a photo booth, a cake (with android figures on it!) and champagne, and even a game of "ladder toss"; it was the first time that I'd played and I was actually pretty good at it! Also, it finally rained for a little bit today, giving us a show of realistic Seattle weather! Thankfully though, the rain didn't last too long and pretty soon it was bright and sunny once again. Since it was our last day at Kirkland, we decided to explore the campus one more time, coming upon some very comfortable chairs and even a Game of Thrones-themed conference room! The interior design of the offices are so creative that it often seems like the rooms themselves encourage creativity.

Air hockey!

Reflections of Seattle culture in the building displays.

After leaving the office, we had a mini games night back at the dorms with many decks of cards and board games. We ended up playing a big group game of "Mao", which is easily one of my favourite games... it gets truly addicting, to the point where we stayed up playing until 3am. However, games night was a very easy-going way for everyone to relax and unwind, ending a week of hard work.

Seattle landscape mural on the wall

Thank you to everyone at Google Kirkland for taking care of us this past week, particularly to the many teachers and teaching assistants who volunteered their time to share their knowledge and wisdom with us. We had such a lovely time this week exploring the campus and learning a lot from you! As we move on into the next two weeks, I can't wait to see what Google Seattle holds for us.

Our thank-you message on an eraseable whiteboard wall!