Computer Science Boot-camp

Hey all, today’s post is about this “computer science” boot-camp I attended at the start of summer, computer science being between air-quotes because I really don’t know what to call it, the boot-camp was a combination of different seminars and workshops on different topics across the big field that are computers, with touches from other fields such as design or engineering. In this blog post I want to talk a bit about what I did in this small course since we did many different activities which I thought were very interesting.

The Backstory

First I want to give a little background as to how I got into this course because I actually did not have to pay anything for it, the course was offered by the university adjacent to the school I go to, I don’t know if I feel comfortable sharing its name but my school basically forms part of a big institution which has a private university, because of this there are often many activities in which the schools go to the university, as an example I had already gone to the university many times for debates or different MUNs. The case is that this time the university hosted a competition for fighting climate change via technological inventions across many different schools, and the three teams who won would be invited to participate in this course valued in 3000 euros (I don’t know where this number comes from, but they told me it so I’m repeating it because it makes it sound way more important). This all sounds good, but the thing is that I actually did not participate in this contest as it was only offered to National Baccalaureate students, and as I’ve told the blog before I am studying the International Baccalaureate. I don’t know why they decided to do it like this, maybe the school thought that IB students wouldn’t have the time to participate, but the case is that I did not even know that this contest was taking place.

Long story short, the contest ends and three teams from three different schools win, a team from a school in the very south of Spain, a team from a school in the Philippines, and finally, a team from my school, however since the course was on summer there was a teammate from my school who had already planned a trip with his family and could not participate in it, so the school was left with a vacant spot in their team to participate in this course, here’s when I come in. Since I’m constantly creating and participating in technology related events the school knows I have a big interest in it, for example I run a programming club where I teach some of my peers basic python skills, or how I presented them a grade calculator which I made in python. So when the principal of the school learnt that they had a vacant spot in this course, she decided to offer it to me, very thoughtful! And I’m grateful to have had this opportunity.

What we did:

During the course we attended different seminars, the most interesting ones for me were the ones about cybersecurity and machine learning, in the cybersecurity seminar we learnt a bit about front-end and back-end web which I was kind of familiar with due to the tiny bit of pen-testing I had done on Kali Linux, the speaker was part of Telefonica’s blue team so he also taught us about the ethics and legality of “hacking” which was a new interesting point of view to see cybersecurity from. Apart from that we accessed different open ports of the web through shodan; there was a surprising amount of security cameras free to see on the internet, finally we got recommended some platforms with gamified hacking challenges to learn, which I’ll make sure I check out.

The machine learning seminar/workshop was definitely my favorite, during this one I finally got the opportunity to do a small project with machine learning after hearing about it for so long. The seminar started explaining the key concepts which I was already kind of familiar with, we were shown many examples and created our first machine learning model using a logarithmic regression for a specific dataset with BigML, after that we went deeper into neural networks, we first understood them thanks to the resources at Tensorflow’s Playground, then the speaker showed us his own AI which learnt to play the level 1-1 of the original Super Mario Bros using neural networks. The seminar was super interesting, but the best part by far was the workshop, I actually plan to do a separate blog post showing all the code for this since its so fun, so I won’t spoil much, but we created bots in Minecraft which were able to distinguish between mobs using our very own trained ai models. Really cool stuff, stay tuned for that.

The rest of the week we spent doing some other less interesting activities, at some point we did your usual robotics stuff with some robots which work similarly to the ones I have made with LEGO before, this part I didn’t really care for since we just had to solve some pretty simple challenges with scratch-like code. We also did some 3D printing which went catastrophically since we were a sizeable class with only one printer to use. And finally, we got taught the basics of After Effects, so we could do little animations with our names, which again I didn’t really care for since I was already familiar with the software, but I can understand how my peers may have enjoyed it.

Overall the experience was great, I got to make friends with the students from the Philippines and also with our peers from southern-Spain who were very all really nice, in addition to strengthening my bond with my friends from the national baccalaureate who I don’t usually hang out with a lot. All of the workshops and seminars were super interesting with very knowledgeable teachers, and the only time I had any sort of issue with them was because I had already seen some of the stuff on my own, which they obviously cannot account for. So, I just want to use this post to thank my school once again for the opportunity.

As always thanks for reading my blog and stay tuned for the very cool Minecraft AI post!