Connor Morley IB CAS Blog

Due to the water crisis that hit Houston yesterday, I was unable to find the Rice cryptocurrency course meeting on campus as most of the buildings had been closed, and as no prior announcement was sent to notify the interns. Despite this I spent some time walking around the Rice University campus and admiring the various sites there are to see. Additionally, upon arriving home and grabbing dinner I curled up and did some cryptocurrency/blockchain research myself to fill this gap, so fortunately all was not lost. (Learning Outcome: #1, #5)

On February 20, I actually went to Rice University to attend day one of the course my internship supervisor taught to the MBA candidates. It was pretty interesting seeing all of the MBA candidates in the room, but it was also quite intimidating; me and my fellow intern were the only teens in the entire room, and presumably building, which I guess is really not surprising considering the context we were in. Although most of the information I already knew due to researching it to create the slideshow that was being displayed behind him, it was still a really cool experience attending an actual college course. (Learning Outcome: #1, #6)

I have been working on completing slides for my internship supervisor, which will be used in a presentation given to this class of MBA candidates at Rice. The research involved in creating these slides has been really cool and interesting, and has taught me a lot more about cryptocurrency and blockchain economics. An example of one of these slides is below:

It's a new year and a new decade! With that comes more CAS, of course. Over the past month, I've been working on a personal coding project (that fulfills the Activity requirement), for two primary reasons: I want enough practice programming in Java to ensure my success on the IB Computer Science exam, and additionally programming is something that I enjoy and that relaxes me, and will also ensure that I have adequate extra preparation for the computer science degree that I hope to attain. What I have been coding is a simple game that involves the player travelling around a map to slay monsters and earn gold. The game map is initialized with a 2D array of single characters, with certain points on the array made to represent different enemies and items. The goal is that this game will help me reinforce concepts of object-oriented programming for the reasons above; this will possibly always be a work in progress for me as I update the game in accordance with new strategies and...