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...

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)