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Year in Review
[ “Year in Review” is where you should reflect on the past year and show how you have evolved as a person and as a student. You may want to focus on your growth in a particular area (as a leader, scholar, researcher, etc.) or you may want to talk about your overall experience over the past year. For more guidance on using your ePortfolio, including questions and prompts that will help you get started, please visit the Honors & Scholars ePortfolio course in Carmen. To get answers to specific questions, please email eportfolio@osu.edu. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]
G.O.A.L.S.
Global Awareness
Currently taking a course in Business, I practice piano and plan to take multiple courses in music and design. I’ve always loved music, and I enjoy analyzing songs for their cord progressions, structures and other basic properties. I look forward to understanding more about music and how to analyze it. Additionally, I have always enjoyed video games, not just for playing them, but for how they are set up, designed, and created to be as fun and meaningful as possible. For this reason I plan on taking multiple design classes centered around games. Finally, I plan to explore areas like architecture or possibly accounting.
Original Inquiry
I’ve always enjoyed modifying games, and began to do so when I realized I could apply this hobby to a capstone project for my high school. In doing so, I made a custom storyline with custom characters, enemies, and areas all linked together with dialogue, scripting, and basic artificial intelligence. Scripting was done in a language based on C and characters and areas were made using built in design wizards. The amount of effort it takes to make a flawless game with minimal bugs and an engaging storyline is intense, and a great amount of time went into completing this project over the required minimum hours. Despite this work, I greatly enjoyed this experience and continue to improve and continue the storyline that I started.
Academic Enrichment
In high school, I always strived for a 4.0 during each year. Though I achieved this in high school, I have already experienced the great increase in course difficulty in college. Thus far, I have achieved at least a B+ in all of my classes, with most classes at an A- or A. I hope to maintain or improve upon these grades throughout my time in college. In addition, I plan on taking many courses in the Computer Science and Engineering major, more than is required by the major. Hopefully I will find what I most like in my major, whether that involves game development, artificial intelligence, or some other specialization within my field.
Leadership Development
In order to gain more leadership skills, I plan to start a club in the future. This club would be called the Waffle House club and would be a social club where members would go out to the Waffle House on high street weekly or biweekly to hang out with friends and enjoy some Waffles. While this club could be funded by the university, it would not be necessary as long as members brought some form of money with them. However, in addition to the social aspect, this club would support a charity organization chosen by the members in order to raise awareness. Funds could then be raised through the selling of Waffle House club t-shirts with the charity organization logo placed somewhere on the shirt. Not only would this club foster a community within the university, but also help raise funds for a good cause.
Service Engagement
I have volunteered three times thus far and plan to volunteer more if I am able. I entertained those in a nursing home by playing piano for them and assisting them in puzzles along with others in my learning community. I enjoyed the experience and may use my talent in piano at other nursing homes. Additionally, I helped weed a garden behind Jenning’s Hall. Though I was unable to stay for the entire time, I did a considerable amount of weeding and felt a sense of community weeding with all the other students who came to volunteer. Finally, I helped clean Luka Park. I was surprised by how much trash we found in and around the park, and it felt good to clean up something part of Ohio’s history. Even before college I volunteered at my church frequently during mass and during our Parish’s Lenten Fish Fry.
Career
[“Career” is where you can collect information about your experiences and skills that will apply to your future career. Like your resume, this is information that will evolve over time and should be continually updated. For more guidance on using your ePortfolio, including questions and prompts that will help you get started, please visit the Honors & Scholars ePortfolio course in Carmen. To get answers to specific questions, please email eportfolio@osu.edu. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]
Artifacts
MATLAB Game Project
During my time in ENGR 1181 at OSU, I worked on a project with a team of 3 other engineering students to create a game in MATLAB. Our team designed both a Blackjack game and a Battleship game. I was mostly involved in the Blackjack game only, though I did aid in mapping out possible ways to create AI in the Battleship game. I found this project very enjoyable and did more than just the minimum requirements.
To create the Blackjack game, some
Self Aligning Remote Control Car Side Project
In this project I made a remote controlled car using VEX Robotics parts and programming in VEX’s RobotC program. This project was very informal and only graded for completion. I had wanted to attempt to do make an RC car based of Halo’s Warthog using these parts, but my high school’s classes or clubs were usually using them. Additionally, I had around 3 years of experience with the VEX parts and how they work best together. Because of these factors, I decided to do little brainstorming. The crude drawing on the right is the only official brainstorming I completed for this small project. The “P”s stand for where the car’s parts could pivot, meaning that point of the car would not move relative to the car itself. The “J”s stand for joints, and these points could move both rotationally or translationally relativ
e to the car. As indicated, thicker lines represent parts of the frame of the car that would not move, and thinner lines represent parts of the frame of the car that would move during operation. The car was designed to have one motor turn both the front and the back wheels using gears represented as circles in the center of the drawing, with four individual motors powering the four wheels represented by circles in the four corners of the drawing.
So far, this project doesn’t have much to with my major of Computer Science and Engineering. However this came in when programing the robot in RobotC. When it came to RobotC, I was less experienced than I was with the VEX parts, and used the guidance of a friend to help me get the basic structure of the program set up (while loops for constant updating, port names, etc.). Once the basic environment was set up. I had to code in the if statements that would decide whether or not the wheels were misaligned, and then realign the wheels. This was done using encoders, and numerous tests were done to determine a good range for the car to know it was already aligned.
Some challenges that arose during this project was the fact that many of our high school’s VEX parts were either broken or deteriorating. Motors and encoders had to be replaced while testing and improving the design. Another issue was with overcorrections. At times, the car moved it’s wheels past the range of rest, having to re-correct an infinite number of times. Structure was also an issue as more and more improvements were added to the car (additional motors for power, gears for torque and speed, etc.). The final product was fairly flimsy but was also lightweight. By far the largest issue was mounting motors on all four wheels. The motors had to be connected directly to the axel of the wheels, and there are no differential parts that I could have used. Additionally, I intended to keep the motors contained on the inside of the car. This posed a mounting and power based problem for the motors. This problem then led to the motors overheating and drawing a significant amount of current from the battery. As such, a fully charged 7 volt battery lasted around a minute, and motors would need to cool down after around 2 consecutive cycles. The car ended up correcting its wheels to near straight and went around 2 ft/s at its top speed. I greatly enjoyed this mini project and learned about how far certain parts and motors can go before reaching their limit. I also was able to examine my interests not only in computer science, but also electrical and mechanical engineering.
A link to the informal notes I took during this project: Warthog Design Progress Log-1kq084k
About Me
My name is Jeffrey Gaydos and I am a student at The Ohio State University intending to go into the major Computer Science and Engineering. Currently, I am involved in the learning community at Ohio State known as Green Engineering Scholars. I was born and raised in Hilliard, Ohio, and attended Hilliard Bradley High School. I grew up with three brothers, two of which are Ohio State students studying Mechanical Engineering, with the third studying Civil Engineering at the University of Dayton. Also, my father is currently a Mechanical Engineer, so engineering has been a prominent part of my life from a very young age.
When I was growing up, I believed I would go into engineering, but was not sure which specific field I should go into. I defaulted to mechanical engineering knowing that it was in general the right choice for me. However, as I advanced through high school, my brother pointed out that since I had been experimenting with code like HTML, CSS, and other C based languages, that I should consider computer science. I had never taken a computer science class and thought that I may fall behind compared to others who had been taking lots of coding classes. Another deterrent was that I was unsure how much I wanted to code and how much I wanted to deal with hardware. I realized that I had plenty of coding knowledge from what I had done on my own and decided to apply for the pre-major Computer Science and Engineering, understanding that I would get a feel for more coding and some hardware. Whether or not I stick with this major depends on how much I find myself enjoying coding or longing for more hardware, and there is a possibility that I would switch to Electrical Engineering at a later date.