Connor Morley IB CAS Blog

As the final assignment for my internship, my internship supervisor asked me as well as one of my fellow interns to grade several assignments, which detailed ways that cryptocurrency/blockchain impacts the world and the potential business opportunities that arise from it (which connected to the global understanding and potential impact that I researched during the internship) created by the MBA students taking the class. This intern and I sat during a free period and looked over each of the individual assignments, and tried to determine what each student should receive. We ultimately determined that everyone knew their material well, and we didn't give a single grade below a B, as we thought that everyone worked really hard and did a good job. Maybe a little underwhelming for a final project, but nevertheless cool to grade materials, and I'm thankful for such a great internship experience that I've had over the past six months. (Learning Outcome: #1, #3, #4, #6, #7)

Lately, I have been negotiating with the head of the middle school campus of my school in planning a service project for National Honor Society, where I'm planning to teach the middle schoolers of the campus computer programming, which I believe really connects with the nationwide and worldwide need of more leaders in STEM fields as computing becomes larger and larger every day. Besides the implementation of the Magic: The Gathering Club at school, I haven't really done much of service for the school in a while, so I'm really excited for this upcoming project. Additionally, ever since there was a relative void left when I decided to no longer do workouts with Blake, I've been lately getting outside more and doing walks around the neighborhood, which is really nice and allows me to appreciate the nice breeze, blue sky, and the world outside of strings and screens. (Learning Outcome: #1, #3, #6)

On the 29 of February I attended the final cryptocurrency/blockchain economics course for my internship. Although I missed the last meeting (which turned out to be taking place in another building that I was unaware of), this didn't really impede my ability to understand the content, especially because, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, most of the information I had already researched. It was also interesting seeing the various guests and speakers who have had experience in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space, which provides a nice contrast to the more theoretical and economical information that me and my fellow interns have been receiving. (Learning Outcome: #1, #6)

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...

At this point, I'm pretty much ready for the holidays. School has been going well, and it's only the first day of December, but I really want to be on break already. Nevertheless, things have been going well. It's been a while since I've received any substantial activity, although that's because I have been really preoccupied with school and my interests are primarily sedentary, although I do intend on getting more activity like I had been doing earlier in my CAS journey. Most of my creativity at this point has been researching different computer architectures and things of the sort in order to see what project I should pursue next, but soon the ball should get rolling in terms of fully undergoing these projects. (Learning Outcome: #3)

Well, things have not been going exactly as planned in terms of the club. I have still been trying to ensure that the scheduling works out for everybody, but things are a little bit murky. Honestly, it seems like a lot of people's schedules change from week to week, which I guess isn't necessarily surprising considering that we're dealing with a group of teenagers. Nevertheless, the two meetings that we have had were pretty good, if chill. I have several pre-built decks (there are hundreds of cards available to create decks for each player to use against each other) for the game that we used. Honestly, this club has really been turning out to be 'hang out and play Magic: The Gathering during lunch club', but I guess I'm really not complaining. (Learning Outcome: #1, #2, #3, #4, #7)

This CAS project is something that I've only recently been involved in, and which has more of a purpose than just within CAS. Last month, I got an internship, along with some fellow students with whom I am collaborating, at Rice University, specifically with a professor who has much experience in the business world in Houston as well as beyond. I have been researching to help him build a curriculum for a course that he has been teaching, specifically about the developments within the relatively new world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, and how they impact the world. Although I had initially intended for a more computer science-focused internship rather than something like this which is more economics-based, I have discovered that this is still extremely interesting and has applications in computer science as well. (Learning Outcome: #1, #2, #4, #6)

Since senior year has started back up, things have been pretty great. So great, that I have even decided to start my own club. This had happened even a couple of years ago, where I tried starting a computer club at school, but that plan never really followed-through.  However, this time I'm fairly confident that things will go great. Back in September there was a club fair at the school, where leaders of clubs could create poster boards and try to recruit new members. I created a poster board for a Magic: The Gathering club that I literally thought of starting that day. I picked the game up over the summer, and decided that it would be fun to bring it to the school, as, besides D&D club, I feel like there is a lack of practicing the great art of physical, tabletop gaming at school. In order to properly carry-out this club, I negotiated with potential members who signed the sign-up sheet so that I could find a schedule that didn't interfere with the schedules of the potentia...

Lately I've been continuing to practice my guitar. I've been attempting to branch out and explore some more esoteric styles of playing that really contrast with the blues-based styles that are so typical in rock music and that I'm so used to. I've also walked my neighbor's dog, Pepper, twice over this past month when her owners weren't home, which was nice. I usually don't even walk my own dog (that's usually my mom), to be honest, but I will occasionally, and it was nice doing this as Pepper is really sweet and well-behaved (which really can't be said for my dog all of the time). Overall, a nice relaxing month besides school with some music and dogs. (Learning Outcome: #1, #7)

I've diverted my attention at the moment from my GUI program to other matters, particularly guitar. For pretty much my entire life, I've had many diverse interests, but have typically only focused on one or two at a time, often to an obsessive point. This continues to this day, where mostly these interests have shifted back and forth from programming to playing guitar. I wouldn't consider myself a superstar or anything, but I would say that I have pretty good rhythm ability and can play fairly basic blues-based solos. I typically either noodle-around with blues solos and pentatonic scales, or try to learn and play the music that deeply interests me, primarily the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. There hasn't been a lot super specific going on , but this is generally what I've been focusing on before school starts back up again later in the month. (Learning Outcome: #1)

This past month I've been continuing to program my D&D monster generation program. It is still relatively complex, and all of the randomization and generation I still don't fully have the hang of yet. In fact, since the program is actually in a GUI (graphical-user-interface) window and not in some black command line with green text like some hacker's computer from a 1980s movie, it took a while learning the ropes of even creating the GUI in the first place, and there were some frustrating setbacks, as with any piece of coding work (this primarily took the form of . Admittedly, that is where most of the progress has been made. However, I'm pretty proud of the work I've put in thus far, and I really like some of the art that I've incorporated, including some of my favorite art of the beholder (a monster in the game) that I've seen (below). (Learning Outcome: #1, #2) Some nice 1990s D&D monster art utilized in my program

Now that school has been out for the summer for around a week or so, I've been quite busy catching-up on Netflix, YouTube, and video games...despite these distractions, I've also focused some of my attention on coding. I've been trying to improve my ability with Java and object-oriented programming in general, specifically building an application that randomly generates monsters that Dungeon Masters could use in their campaigns. I don't really have a ton of experience with random generation and randomly-accessed variables, so hopefully this will be a learning experience that will also result in a pretty cool program. (Learning Outcome #1, #2)

I would say that the ISAS Festival was a rousing success. Now, there, like with any event, there are definitely things that I would improve. Although I believe that I worked hard in preparation for the event, I nevertheless believe that I possibly could have prepared even more for the event. Although I did well, there were still some minor mistakes I made in my performances that I could have probably corrected. I'm still satisfied with myself, still, and I also think the point of the festival was mostly the overall experience itself: seeing all the young teen artists and their work, going to different master classes for different artistic disciplines (you're free to go to any of them, regardless of what arts or performances you're signed-up for). Additionally, I got a lot of activity in due to the large distances of walking required. The St. Stephen's campus is enormous, probably rivaling some college campuses in its size, and the vast distances covered each day were ...

The ISAS Festival is upcoming within the next week, which I guess is overshadowed somewhat by me parting ways with Blake; I've just decided that his style of instruction and working out wasn't for me I don't exactly know how I'm going to perform my activity going forward, but I'll find a way. Anyway, in regards to ISAS, I've been quite busy revising and determining what songs/passages to play, and how to play them and interpret them to properly suit my playing ability. To be honest, I'm a little nervous. I've performed in front of people before, but these performances have been few and far between. Plus, they've been in front of adults mostly, whereas at the festival it will be in front of almost exclusively fellow peers and teens from various parts of the country, not just Texas. Nevertheless, I believe that these nerves will possibly influence me to play and perform even better. (Learning Outcome #1, #2, #3, #5)

Over the past week I have been preparing for the upcoming ISAS Arts Festival at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas. I am quite excited for the event as I have been looking forward to it ever since it was announced that we would be going again in the fall. The event is comprised of numerous schools that are part of the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS), which is comprised of private or independent schools from Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. For the event, each participating student is signed-up for multiple categories of their choosing. For this event, I am signed up for only two: solo guitar instrumental and coffeehouse. Solo guitar instrumental involves me playing guitar (vocal accompaniment using my own voice optional), whereas coffeehouse is really what it sounds like: an informal acoustic (occasionally electric, but usually not) performance involving some performer(s) and an audience.  Overall, I've been re...

I have been continuing to attend D&D Club at school. I've also been continuing to attend Film Club whenever it occurs, although there really isn't a tight schedule to pull it all together; it is supposed to happen every Tuesday, although at this point I guess it's just whenever Trevor feels like it, which I honestly can't blame him for as I'm often pretty tired after school as well. I plan on going into computer science, which to set myself apart from the general crowd that will just go and study what they want in college, likely without much afterthought or passion, I want to begin doing coding projects again. For now, though, I feel that D&D, Film Club, and working out with Blake in addition to school is more than enough with everything else I have going on in terms of homework and school commitments. (Learning Outcome #5)

Much of this past month was taken up by the 3D Magnetic Sculptures J-Term with Mike, and due to the exhaustion that followed most school days, I have been a little lighter on CAS work than usual. Nevertheless, the month has not been entirely devoid of it. I have been continuing to attend D&D Club and have had a lot of fun with my friends in that regard. Also, I have been continued to go to the gym and get personal training from Blake. I understand that it is good for your body (and mind for that matter), and I intend on continuing, but I sometimes wish that there was some sort of physical exercise that I truly enjoyed. Talking to him while working out is okay, but I don't know if the exhaustion that I feel by the end is entirely worth something that I am not myself entirely invested in. I'll see where it goes from here, but for now I'm sticking with it. My goal is to keep sticking with it and improving my mental and physical fitness through exercise, but we'll see...