Days 4 and 5 - Thursday and Friday

My only scheduled session on Thursday started at 2pm, so I didn’t go into Uni until I’d made sure that I had a good lunch. The session was a practical for Distributed Systems, although no task was set, only to work on the assessment due the next day. Some had nearly finished, some had finished and some had hardly started.

Our group project normally meets on a Friday morning, but we had already agreed that this would be moved to Monday due to the deadline.

We all worked on the assessment, helping each other out as we came across problems and then playing each others games as they got to the point where they were playable. The best games, in my opinion, where the ones with the best story lines. There were some really creative ones that I really would have liked to see expanded on. It’s a shame that after students complete assessments they are rarely ever looked at again and the code is usually lost.

By around 9pm, I was starting to feel hungry and ordered a Dominos pizza to the University. We do this often enough that the drivers know where to find our building, but will typically not leave their car so we have to walk to collect it. Still, it’s an easy way to eat food when you don’t have time to walk all the way to a takeaway.

By 11pm I had completed the vast majority of the code. The students that remained in the room were nearing the same stage although most had finished and gone home already. I took a break at this point and played Minecraft for an hour.

After my break, I finished off the remaining parts of the code and let a few people play it. They were unable to find any bugs and I declared it complete. As I had no scheduled sessions on the Friday (it was Friday by this point), after submitting the assessment I stayed to help anyone that had any problems and to help them test their games.

The University has strict guidelines on plagiarism and sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between helping someone reach a solution and simply handing them a solution. My rule of thumb is that I never touch their keyboard or just dictate code. As long as I avoid those two things, they have arrived at the solution themselves.

By 4am, everyone was done. One student took a taxi home, the rest of us walked. Now the reason why this post has both Thursday and Friday combined: Friday really didn’t happen. I slept through the whole day, happy in the knowledge that I had completed the assessment well and did not have to do anything.

This weekend will be spent putting my sleep pattern back to normal for Monday, where the whole thing starts again.

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