Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the TIP Tapper program during the seventh day of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

 
Today we did a few simulations off of 
the web on rabbits and wolves, galaxies, 
and the game of life.  We got to mess 
around with the parameters and see what 
happened to the model.  It was pretty 
fun, but i wouldn't want to do it for 
more than one day.  All three simulations 
were pretty cool, but we still need more 
juice boxes.    --Natalie

I'm about ready to start on actual 
projects and stuff. The only thing I want 
to complain about is the fact that we have 
less time before breakfast, after lunch, 
and after 4:00 than any other class because 
of the time taken to walk from campus to the 
class building. It could not be that much 
trouble to get a van for morning and afternoon 
as well so we wouldn't lose all that time. I 
guess that's about it for now. Hopefully 
projects will be fun.


 Natalie and Harding
 

 
Oooh boy... Time to decide what to do for final 
presentation. I'd love to do the physics of the 
Frisbee, but i'm not sure which part of that i 
would like to focus or which would be possible 
with the alotted time constaints.  I think that 
chemistry and physics are wonderful.


 Bevin and Ben
 

 
Today we learned about building models based on 
a set of rules as opposed to a given formula.  
I found the program Galaxsee very interesting.  
I may want to work more  with this tool on my 
final project. The other tools we used were 
Sim Surface and Life.


 Eric and Jason
 

 
This morning, we ran some models of galaxies.  
It was fun, partly because i'm interested in that
kind of thing, but maybe that's not the same for 
other people.  We did things on electron repulsion 
andnrandomness today, too.   I guess the whole point 
of today was to play with other kinds of models. Like
using rules instead of algorithms to make a model.  
It was a pretty good length of time to fit 
everything in.  I'm getting pretty worried about 
final presentations.  Although we've been talking 
about it since the beginning of the term, we have 
no idea what our projects should be.


 liz and renee
 

 
Today we began by using a program called GalaxSee, 
which models the behavior of galaxies from the 
number of stars, their masses, and the galaxy's 
spin. Later, we used a program that models annealing; 
then, two online programs, Life and Pixelworld, that 
produce patterns of pixels in realtime based on a 
set of rules.


 Matt and Ryan
 

 
Today we spent most of our time running other 
people's models. Most of them were quite interesting, 
but Life was probably the most interesting of all of 
the models.  Save the GRASS! One day should be about 
enough for what we did today.


 Kevin and Alexander
 

 
Today was interesting because we learned different 
ways to model data, including Life, GalaxSee, and 
Rabbits and Wolves.  This helped with things like 
astrophysics and population dynamics, which will 
set a lot of us up for our final project.  It's 
good that we were able to learn these methods.
Some of the physics were hard because I didn't 
really understand it.  I think that it was all 
right that many things were crammed into today.  
The programs were very interesting.


 Madhu and Russell