School’s Out for Summer

Hey everybody. Hope you had a good Juhannus back home in Finland and for those not familiar with Juhannus it’s a midsummer festival celebration and a big deal in Finland. Anyway, this is my post about how my studies have gone here in Graz. On Friday I had my last exam and now we can focus on just enjoying Graz for our last week here. Originally, I had three courses that I was doing, but quite early I dropped my Mobile Application course. The course seemed interesting, but it was a massive course with over 200 students and that being split into many smaller working groups and in the end I just felt it was too much of a mess with all the work being done on one day in a large around eight hour span and at different schools. On top of this I was confused with the groups and assignments early on and I couldn’t get any answers from the professors or the tutor students assigned for the course, so I just decided to F it and not waste my time with worrying about a course like that. Two other courses I managed to finish so I’ll go over them. Sorry not too many pictures etc for this post.

First of the other courses is the Simulation and Animation course. This is a bit of an interesting one. I posted earlier about how I planned my game Moomin Kart as a 2D web-based driving game. In the game I was supposed to implement two animation techniques for which I selected Motion Blur and Path Interpolation. Motion Blur is an effect to give the sense of something moving super-fast by blurring the image, and Path Interpolation is pathing an object along a curve with a steady speed and certain points the object needs to hit. I got the basic structure of the game going fairly well, but the animation techniques were a real pain in the end. The course material was basically all theory and didn’t offer much help with the code and there wasn’t a great amount of helpful material online either, so it ended up being a bit of a mess. I’ll add a few gifs of how my trials failed when I was testing my methods.

On top of this programming task at the end we had an oral exam on the theory and on the game. This is where I got little lost. I never had an oral exam in a course that was not a language course. Also, a lot of the course material dealt with physics that impact animations an I am god awful with physics. I understood the basic methods and tools of the animations and was totally satisfied with what I had learned during the classes, but the oral exam questions were just too detailed and heavy on the physics. Part of the difficulty I had was that the course description doesn’t have prerequired courses or knowledge other than some coding, but the course is mandatory to some engineer programming students at the school and their degree is heavy on physics. With all this I failed the oral exam twice and the thought was that I would not get an accepted grade on the course. Luckily the professor was willing to give me additional tasks to make up for my failed tests. This is one occasion where I think my profile as an Erasmus student helped me, as it sounded like it was highly irregular to be allowed this. I will finish my extra report once I get back to Finland and I will get my grade little later than the other participants.

Me going to the oral exam

Second course that I finished was Social Media Technologies. This course didn’t have as special of a story as the previous one. Objective of the course was to do a scientific research on some chosen subject by using Social Media as a dataset. This was done in groups and I ended up in a specially large group of 6. The group was a gang of good girls and boys, but in the end, we took the course too laid back and had to rush the research at the end. I tried to get us started earlier but crawling social media data was something I had no knowledge of. I still was interested in it and I tried getting the gang to start on it so I could participate. In the end we kind of rushed the whole thing and spread tasks to pairs, so I didn’t get to be a part of the crawling and that bummed me out a bit. Our research was on popular holiday destinations, but we did not have a clear idea on that either. The team wanted to just crawl data with hashtags from Twitter and see what beach in the world gets most mentions and make a list on that. I would have wanted to do a more in-depth look at a better research question and do more searching around with our dataset, but in the end it was so last minute that I didn’t even see our results until the day before our presentation to the whole class. I still think we had a good presentation and a good research document so we should pass with an ok-ish grade. We’ll see when that comes in after a couple of days. 

That was a long post, or long in text at least. I did enjoy both my courses and I feel like I learned from both of them. Still, the course selection at the beginning was a bit of a hassle since many courses had language marked as English or German and the actual language was confirmed when the course started so this made selecting the courses before arriving a little hard and I missed two that I had planned on taking. In the end I’m happy with the amount I took as it gave me time to enjoy the other sides of exchange student life.